Beterra Client Leadership Series: Adedayo Dada, MD, MPH, CPHQ, CPPS, LSSGB

System by Design, Culture by Heart: Dr. Adedayo Dada's Global Perspective on Patient Safety

From serving under-resourced hospitals in Sub-Saharan Africa to leading high-reliability strategy at a prominent U.S. health system, Dr. Adedayo Dada's journey is anything but conventional. But for him, that's the point.

"Serving underserved populations showed me how fragile the promise of healthcare can be," he says. "It also taught me how powerful systems can be when they're designed for the people in them."

Today, as Executive Director of Patient & Medication Safety and Just Culture Programs at Wellstar Health System, Dr. Dada is using that insight to reshape how safety is defined, delivered, and sustained.

A Mission Forged Across Borders

Dr. Dada's path began in Nigeria, where he trained as a physician. Clinical rotations in the United Kingdom and graduate education in the U.S. exposed him to vastly different healthcare systems. He also spent time in Bhubaneswar, India, and Toronto, Canada. These global experiences broadened his understanding of how cultural values, political structures, and resource availability influence local health systems.

Though very different, these diverse systems all shared a common thread: systemic inequities and fragmented safety cultures.

A pivotal moment came in graduate school when he took a class taught by the late Dr. Lucian Leape, widely regarded as the father of modern-day patient safety. "He talked about harm, not in theory, but in truth," Dr. Dada recalls. "It made the mission clear: safety isn't a box to check; it's a cultural movement."

Redesigning Safety with Rigor and Empathy

At Wellstar, Dr. Dada has led two key safety initiatives: a full redesign of the causal analysis methodology and the implementation of standard work protocols for safety event reviews in specific service lines.

The first project focused on training both safety professionals and executive sponsors to enhance consistency and accuracy in root cause analyses. The second centered on service line-level event reviews, ensuring credibility and independence while promoting enterprise-wide learning.

"When you treat safety analysis like a system and not as a reaction, you build a foundation for scale," he says. "And you build trust."

Naming the Real Challenges

Ask Dr. Dada about the greatest obstacle in advancing safety, and he doesn't flinch: "Leadership engagement." Healthcare organizations often hesitate to acknowledge system-level culpability or invest in the cultural foundations of Just Culture.

"Safety should be a daily imperative. It is not an initiative," he says. "Yet many institutions are strangely comfortable with unsafe conditions. That has to change."

He also emphasizes involving patients and families not just as recipients of care, but as co-creators of care models and safety strategies. "There's a huge gap in how we engage patients and families," he says. "We need their voices in defining value, quality, and what safety truly means."

AI, Human Factors, and Moral Clarity

Dr. Dada is especially energized by the integration of AI with human factors in safety design. He's also closely watching the implications of the CMS Patient Safety Structural Measures, which he believes will raise the baseline for programmatic excellence.

He's vocal about the emotional toll that patient safety professionals experience. "There's moral distress in this work," he says. "We often have to navigate ethical dilemmas and organizational land mines, and it's not talked about enough."

For those just starting out: "Be a sponge. Be eager to learn everything. Stay humble. Know that sometimes, the harm prevented never sees the light because of your efforts."