Our Mission Talia’s Voice: Projects for Patient Safety seeks to change the culture in medical settings, improve care, and save lives by getting healthcare providers to listen to each patient, stand up for them, and take appropriate action on their behalf.
What We Do
Education
Education is our most important tool and we concentrate on:
Listening as a value
The impact of ineffective communication on patient outcomes
What effective communication between members of a healthcare team looks like
Delightful, bubbly, creative, and athletic, Talia Goldenberg died at age 23 because her doctors, nurses, and support staff, all failed to listen when Talia, her physician father, and her mother repeatedly told them that Talia couldn’t breathe. For 20 hours, each member of Talia’s healthcare team dismissed or ignored Talia’s symptoms and pleas for help. Had any one of them listened and acted on her behalf, Talia would be alive today.
Talia’s parents, Dr. Jeff Goldenberg and Naomi Kirtner, have a powerful story to share. As founders of Talia’s Voice: Projects for Patient Safety, they are agents for change, telling Talia’s story in hospitals, medical and nursing schools, health management programs—anywhere that healthcare workers and patients intersect. They tailor their talks to the group to whom they are speaking and are comfortable with large and small audiences. If you work at, or are an administrator in, a hospital or medical educational setting, please contact us. The impact of Talia’s story will be lasting.
“There is a buzz in the house from your visit.” — Jon Friedenberg, COO, Marin General Hospital
Our goal at Talia’s Voice is deceptively simple and deeply complex: we want to change the culture in medicine so that nobody’s child, sibling, partner or parent dies because the people in charge won’t listen. Help strengthen our voice in the fight to make hospitals safe for our loved ones.
Your contribution makes it possible for us to do vital work that benefits all patients—and we will all be patients at some point.
Our larger-than-life, lion-hearted brother-in-law, Gabriel Romano, died this month. His daughter (Talia’s first cousin who is herself a new doctor) and Jeff were by his side as Gabe took his last breath. He fought hard to overcome the particularly aggressive cancer...
February is always grueling for us—a long slog through all the moments, dates, and events that took Talia from us forever. To honor and remember Talia on this eighth anniversary, we are proud to announce that Talia’s Voice is sponsoring a significant research study to...
We’ve been active all summer on various task forces and committees working with the Collaborative for Accountability and Improvement (CAI), Ariadne Labs (a center for health systems innovation at Harvard), and in conjunction with Institute for Healthcare...