SimTigrate Design Lab Director Craig Zimring will be the keynote speaker at a symposium on patient safety in Zurich, Switzerland, in April. His topic will be, “Safety by design: making the safest behavior, the easiest behavior.”

Zimring will be the only American among an international group of speakers at the Patient Safety Switzerland Symposium. The theme is “More patient safety by design: Systemic approaches for hospitals.” Patient Safety Switzerland is the country’s national foundation dedicated to safe medicine.

At this meeting “systemic approaches for evi­dence-based design will be presented and future visions will be discussed,” according to the symposium brochure. Medical professionals, risk and quality managers, experts in patient safety, engineers, and architects are among those expected to attend this symposium.

Zimring was invited to this conference to share his expertise. He is one of the founders of the use of evidence-based design, which involves making design decisions based on the best available evidence, often acquired through research or review of peer-reviewed journals.

“Prof. Zimring is one of the leading experts worldwide in the field of patient safety and design – that’s why we invited him to our symposium! We are looking forward to learning from his experiences and his expertise,” Prof. Dr. David Schwappach, Scientific Head of the Swiss Patient Safety Foundation, and Irene Kobler, a project manager with Patient Safety Switzerland, said in an email.

Zimring and his SimTigrate Design Lab focus on using design to create better and safer healthcare experiences, from intensive care units to surgical suites to patient rooms to outpatient care and more. The Lab's past and present partners include the Military Health System, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Emory Healthcare, Cherokee Indian Hospital, Mercy Clinic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and many others.

He said “preventable medical errors in healthcare facilities are the third-leading cause of death in the U.S., resulting in 200,000-400,000 unnecessary deaths. Better design can reduce harms to patients.”

Zimring is also an environmental psychologist and professor in the School of Architecture in the College of Design at Georgia Tech.