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John Nance      

New York Times Best-Selling Author

John J. Nance, a native Texan who grew up in Dallas, holds a Bachelor's Degree from SMU and a Juris Doctor from SMU School of Law, and is a licensed attorney. Named Distinguished Alumni of SMU for 2002, he is also a decorated Air Force pilot veteran of Vietnam and Operations Desert Storm/Desert Shield and a Lt. Colonel in the USAF Reserve, well known for his involvement in Air Force human factors flight safety education, and one of the civilian pioneers of Crew Resource Management (CRM). John has piloted a wide variety of jet aircraft, including most of Boeing's line and the Air Force C-141, and has logged over 13,000 hours of flight time in his commercial airline and Air Force careers. He flies his own aircraft, was a veteran Boeing 737 Captain for Alaska Airlines, and is an internationally recognized air safety analyst and advocate, best known to North American television audiences as Aviation Analyst for ABC World News and Aviation Editor for Good Morning America.

John has logged countless appearances on national shows such as Larry King Live, PBS Hour with Jim Lehrer, Oprah, NPR, Nova, the Today Show, and many others. His editorials have been published in newspapers nationwide, including the Los Angeles Times and USA Today. He has long been listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in American Law, and Who's Who Among Emerging Leaders in America.

He is also the nationally-known author of 19 major books, five non-fiction, plus 13 fiction bestsellers.

John J. Nance is one of America's most dynamic professional speakers, presenting entertaining and pivotal programs on teamwork, risk management, motivation, coping with competition, and other topics to a wide variety of audiences, including business corporations and healthcare professionals. He and fellow author Kathleen Bartholomew (Ending Nurse-to-Nurse Hostility - Why Nurses Eat their Young and Each Other), present vital programs on Quality and Patient Safety to Hospital Boards, Physicians and Physician Leaders, and Hospital Management Nationally and Internationally. He is a pioneering and well-known advocate of using the lessons from the recent revolution in aviation safety to equally revolutionize the patient safety performance of hospitals, doctors, nurses, and all of healthcare.

John is a founding board member and is on the executive committee of the National Patient Safety Foundation. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Speech Topics


The Lessons Learned

In the aftermath of the international healthcare emergency caused by the Covid-19 Pandemic, few if any hospitals large or small have escaped having to deal with major systemic stress. In most cases, in addition to unleashing major unexpected financial challenges, the seismic challenges to clinical staff and all support services has spawned untold examples of how people rose to the occasion (or didn't), and how bedrock procedures and strategies were changed on the fly (and in some cases abandoned) to get the job done. All of this occurred against the backdrop of a massively challenged, frightened, and often polarized civilian population whose lack of collective knowledge and understanding of the factual science often made the hospital's job infinitely more difficult. There has been created, in other words, a major anthology in terms of how your institution dealt with all aspects of the Covid-19 challenge. Moreover, every salient aspect of that anthology (including the clinical, scientific, procedural, human, and financial history) holds untold lessons. Those lessons, if captured and examined appropriately, will light the way to far more realistic systemic and professional knowledge of how high reliability, just culture, patient safety, and the highest level of care are really achieved, especially in your institution!

Survival and Leadership in the Healthcare Revolution

For: All Leaders involved in healthcare, and specifically Hospital/Clinic/Healthcare System C-Suite Chiefs, Directors, Staff Vice Presidents, Managers, Department Heads (Clinical and Non-Clinical), Medical Executive Members, and Members of the Board of Directors/Trustees.

This wide-ranging and comprehensive full-day (8 hours) of dynamic training and coaching for healthcare leaders of all levels consists of a carefully selected mix of energized didactic lectures, Socratic discussion, highly-relevant and challenging exercises, and enterprise coaching for immediate improvement of safety, quality, communication, and teamwork creation.

Encapsulated in the curriculum are the same presentation elements and voluminous takeaway techniques that have been so highly effective in John Nance’s bi-annual segments in the Intermountain ATP Course in Salt Lake City, as well as his twice yearly segments in the Leadership Series conducted by Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston.

John Nance’s background in law, system safety and human factors, national broadcasting and journalism - in addition to his quarter century in medicine - inform a wide range of useful insights regarding both the serious risks and potential remedies for being unprepared to respond appropriately to sentinel events.

Survival and Leadership in the Healthcare Revolution – ½ Day

For: All Leaders involved in healthcare, and specifically Hospital/Clinic/Healthcare System C-Suite Chiefs, Directors, Staff Vice Presidents, Managers, Department Heads (Clinical and Non-Clinical), Medical Executive Members, and Members of the Board of Directors/Trustees.

This wide-ranging half-day (4 hours) of dynamic training and coaching for healthcare leaders of all levels consists of a carefully selected and hard-hitting mix of didactic presentation and Socratic discussion, and enterprise coaching for immediate improvement of safety, quality, communication, and teamwork creation. Encapsulated in the curriculum are the same presentation elements and voluminous takeaway techniques that have been so highly effective in John Nance’s bi-annual segments in the Intermountain ATP Course in Salt Lake City, as well as his twice yearly segments in the Leadership Series conducted by Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston.

John Nance’s background in law, system safety and human factors, national broadcasting and journalism - in addition to his quarter century in medicine - inform a wide range of useful insights regarding both the serious risks and potential remedies for being unprepared to respond appropriately to sentinel events.

Surviving the Affordable Care Act Earthquake: How to Incite the Changes You Need — In Time!

Whether we measure it in terms of reimbursement, patient safety, service quality, market share, or provider satisfaction, there's no question that the landscape of healthcare delivery is being as violently reshaped as if a great earthquake were roiling the terrain. And though we hate to admit it, when your once-familiar world has been upended, it is very hard to be calm and methodical enough to ferret out the right path to survival - especially if those steps are non-traditional. That is why tough and confusing times demand voices and influence from outside the institution - calm, incisive voices that can dramatically boost the urgency of the wakeup calls needed to spark a Renaissance.

The greatest threat to any healthcare institution right now is failing to infuse the appropriate sense of urgency in your people, physicians included. Providing that energizing wakeup call is precisely what this keynote is designed to do: To spark, inspire and incite the cultural and clinical, financial changes you need to surf this tsunami. It is, in other words, designed to be a powerful aide to your efforts to get your "army" marching in the right direction, and for the right reasons.

The Bottom-Line Benefits of Team Leadership Training: Proven Pathway to Minimizing Errors & Maximizing Quality

As of the first months of 2014, a multiplicity of new studies have begun validating up to fifty percent reductions in Wrong Surgeries (wrong site, wrong medication, wrong patient, retained object) throughout hospitals and healthcare settings. The engine of change in virtually all these results is a steadily and universally applied program of Team Leadership Training for the entire medical team involved in any form of surgical intervention at the patient's beside, in the OR, the cath lab, ER, or the physician's office. Going far beyond the basic exposure to Team Steps and aviation's Crew Resource Management, Team Leadership Training creates proven and professional Collegial Interactive Teams, but must be built on complete cultural change.

This lecture lays the groundwork for why this is such a powerful and certain way to improve the performance of not just surgical interventions, but virtually all medical interactions. The hallmark of a mature Collegial Interactive Team is a leader who knows how to bring out the best performance and best participatory ownership in each member of the team. A trained CIT leader - often a physician - knows how to eliminate all communication barriers by making it completely safe for any member to speak up, and by creating and maintaining an atmosphere of mutual respect, constant learning, and non-hierarchical interchange. While these principles, techniques, and methods have never been taught in medical schools, nursing schools, or traditionally used in medicine, the dramatic and positive effects of appropriately inculcating such team leadership go directly to the bottom line, inclusive of significant improvement in morale.

The Medical-Legal Mess & How It Kills Patients

When someone is injured by medical mistake, our legal system is ill-equipped to respond. The section of tort law known as medical malpractice has only one tool: the extraction of money for the wrongful hurting or killing of a patient. And the only means to apply that tool is a ruinously expensive and slow process that requires the lawyers prove the medical professionals being sued were the most negligent, careless, and outrageously unqualified oafs imaginable; very seldom, however, do such persons exist. Most of the time those vilified in order to extract compensation are good doctors and nurses who have made a human mistake in a system ill-designed to catch it in time.

This lecture outlines how Mr. and Mrs. America have been completely disenfranchised by the current MedMal system, and how the cure will require pulling the tort system completely away from incidents of medical MIS-practice – good people making human mistakes in an imperfect system.

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Ending Medical Apartheid

Aimed at physicians, this lecture targets the traditional 4,000-year history of keeping physicians separated from the rest of the healthcare community in ways that are ultimately the prime cause of poor communication, failed teamwork, toxic staff relations, and patient safety disasters. The bottom line is that it will be forever impossible to have a safe and effective medical care system until medical apartheid is ended.

John Nance guides doctors in how to overcome this traditional prejudice, and how to redefine themselves as team leaders with no loss of authority but a significant gain in effectiveness and respect by simply changing the way they relate to their own potential for mistakes, as well as the mistakes of others. This has been, in the majority of instances, a career-changing presentation.

The Board's Pivotal Role in Patient Safety

This lecture will revolutionize the way your board looks at its duties, and will delve deeply into the cause-effect relationship of the board's actions (or inactions) and the right of their hospital's patients to be free from unreasonable risk of inadvertent harm. With patient safety disasters (e.g., medical mistakes) now the 4th leading cause of death in the United States, these issues must be faced and acted on, not just debated.

A pivotal wake-up call, this presentation is best utilized in an off-site board retreat setting. It has been repeatedly praised for rapidly educating hospital boards and for effectively redirecting efforts with their hard-hitting look at the realities of what it takes to protect patients.

The 8 Major Dysfunctionalities of America's Healthcare Non-System

This lecture covers in a completely up-to-date fashion not only the national shift in insurance methods, but the particulars of why the overarching goal of healthcare reform will never work without changing from a fee-for-service community. Healthcare must transition, and fast, to a true system that is compensated more when needed less by an increasingly healthy population.

The role of doctors and nurses and hospitals should be to improve health. The present system, however, cannot stay afloat financially if the number of patients needing its services drops significantly. Therefore, we have an upside down non-system that will only reward practitioners and hospitals if the public health does NOT improve (and the numbers of patients do not diminish). How do we change that system into the "firehouse model," in which healthcare is compensated on an increasing basis for decreasing health problems resulting from their efforts? The future of American healthcare literally depends on finding the right answers (and methods).

How Hospitals Fly

John Nance's Why Hospitals Should Fly sparked a nearly unanimous question across American Healthcare: "How? Agreed, we should be like the safe, happy, and cost-effective St. Michael's Hospital depicted in the book, but how on earth do you begin the process of change? How do you start the journey?" That is precisely the question this entirely new lecture, How Hospitals Fly, deals with—and answers—using specific methodologies, recommendations, and strategies to help you spark an energized internal determination to be the best.

Based on the voluminous research underlying the soon-to-be-published How Hospitals Fly, (the sequel to Why Hospitals Should Fly), and targeted on 2012's tsunami of challenges and changes confronting the industry, this speech tackles the question of what to do now regarding increased dependency on HCAHPS and patient satisfaction metrics, CMS pressures and curtailed reimbursement, the expanding list of "Never" events, and the massive challenge of creating a unified organization from a collection of siloed fiefdoms.

This dynamic lecture takes you with great clarity into the heart of exactly what steps must be taken by senior and middle management to lead your people to break free of the "way we've always done it" syndrome. It gives virtually everyone in the American healthcare setting a crystal-clear understanding of what has to be done, and in what order, to create a unified institution whose members from bottom to top are truly dedicated to zero harm, the highest quality of care, communication, teamwork in its highest expression, and a common level of ownership.

Why Hospitals Should Fly

The Ultimate Flight Plan to Patient Safety & Quality Care

John Nance's mission is to convince people that patient safety and service quality can be dramatically improved only when the traditional, hidebound methods of handling a human institution are abandoned and the hospital is run to directly support, and be extremely responsive to, the needs and limitations of the people who actually take care of the patient. This is not theory, but fact, based on the hard-fought experience of other industries — most notably aviation. And it means the creation of a new type of patient-centered culture dependent on the professionals who are the hospital; in other words a flip-flop of the old model in which people work for a hospital in favor of a paradigm in which the hospital's primary purpose is building and maintaining a structure that dynamically supports the teams that provide the care.

Doctors, nurses, CEOs, trustees and every healthcare stakeholder must overcome the inertia that is anchoring hospitals to the failed cultural foundations of the past and embrace a new paradigm of patient-centered care. As Nance explains, "The reality is that hospitals are people, and when, as a team, they can climb free of the failed methods of the past, they indeed can fly, in both spirit and accomplishment."

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News


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Lockout has 77 ratings and 21 reviews. Joanne said: What a great read this book is, fasted paced with a thrilling plot. The story unfolds from multiple v...
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Barbara It's fiction by novelist and aviation expert John J. Nance. flag ..... Final Approach, by John Nance, a-minus, produced by the Library of Congress National ...

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