Paul J. Sharek

Paul Sharek graduated from Columbia University Medical School in New York, completed residency and chief residency in pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, completed a fellowship in health service research at Stanford University, and received a Masters of Public Health from University of California, Berkeley.

Sharek is presently an assistant professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University, a pediatric hospitalist, and is Medical Director of Quality Management and Chief Clinical Patient Safety Officer at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. His experience with large scale collaborative quality improvement work begin when he was appointed co-medical director of the national 14-site children's hospital quality improvement collaborative known as the Child Health Accountability Initiative from March of 2002 to December 2004. This collaborative focused on pediatric quality and patient safety initiatives. Sharek is presently the Director of Quality Improvement for the California Perinatal Quality of Care Collaborative (CPQCC) and is directing CPQCC's first statewide collaborative quality improvement project in community level NICUs focusing on decreasing healthcare associated infections. He has given a substantial number of presentations at national academic meetings related to patient safety and is co-investigator on several pediatric patient safety grants. He was the principle investigator on the CHCA -housed Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ) "Partnerships for Quality" grant, a $1.3 million, 4-year award focusing on pediatric safety and is presently an investigator or co-investigator on numerous grants focused on pediatric patient safety. He is presently completing a study of 15 PICUs that constructed and tested a trigger tool to identify the rate and types of harm that occur in the Pediatric ICUs setting, and is a faculty member of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) presently working with the IHI to establish the measurement strategy for their 5 million lives campaign. Sharek has published extensively on the topics of pediatric quality of care and patient safety.