There's a lot of people that are thinking about making insurance career path, they're thinking about launching their career, thinking about doing something huge, right? And you have a ridiculously large agency. I think that there's a lot of agents who are struggling with old school methods. I mean, and there's agents who crush it with the old school methods, but for the ones who aren't doing well with the old school methods, what I do might be a great fix. If you are ready to launch your insurance career and do something massive, then my dude JR Ornstein can help with that. Buddy, thanks for taking the time for a few minutes. Yeah man, good to see you Cody. You too buddy, there's a lot of people that are thinking about making insurance career path, they're thinking about launching their career, thinking about doing something huge, right? And you have a ridiculously large agency in New York, super successful, good looking dude, sexy, smart, all the Ss, you know. Keep it coming, keep it coming. Right? If you had to pick one word randomly, one word to describe the launch and success of your career, what would it be? I would say relationships. Ooh, which we're gonna get into later because that's good, that's so good, yeah. I mean, there's obviously a lot of cliches, a lot of buzz words that we all know, right? Hustle and how you're feeding your brain, right? And taking bold action, big action, all of the 10X sort of stuff. So no doubt that's all part of it. I'd say that a huge reason why our agency does well is because of our ability to build and maintain relationships. It's really all about that. And then after you start the relationship, the maintaining is by proving your value. And of course we can get into all of that sort of stuff. Yes, yes, yes. And that's when I think about you, like, because everybody's got their own little gift, their own thing going on, you know.  People like, if someone doesn't love you, they got some wrong with them. That's what I'm saying. Right? You've probably thought that your whole life, you know. Of course. Where does that come from? Has it always been that way for you? Absolutely not. Well, I'll tell you, I'm the type of person who I don't mind attention when I'm asking for it, but I'm naturally more of an introvert, you know. I got no problem, you know, spending Saturday night with my wife on the couch just watching TV. I don't need to be out at the bars. I don't need to be at parties.  That's not actually my style. But what I've done, well, I'd say, especially in the last couple of years is just find ways to have a more natural introduction and then just kind of build upon there and never go into a relationship asking for anything, never expecting anything, but really, you know, hearing people out, seeing what they're all about, what they're looking for, what makes them tick and then see, is this a relationship worth pursuing? Yeah, that's a big piece, man. Everybody is so entitled thinking, you know what, I'm walking in and this relationship, they better do for me or I'm never doing for them, you know? And you always come into every relationship, like even our relationship, you know? It's always like, you know, Cody, what can I do for you? And I'm like, dude, I gotta be more like JR, man. I gotta, that's like, well, Gary Vee had the what? Like a give, give, give method, right? Right hook, right hook, you know, do or jab, jab, jab, right hook, right? And it's, I think that's a big thing, a big takeaway right now, huge nugget that you've already just dropped on us is people need to realize that for a relationship to be successful, you have to give a lot and you have to actually try to give more than the other person. Yeah, I just think that's the overwhelming philosophy for all relationships, period. It's not even about business. I think it's about personal life, it's all relationships. And I've said this to you before, even if you had the most selfish intentions, right? It's still the best strategy to give first and to look for reasons to give. So it's just the way that I look to operate and say, how can I serve the person I'm speaking with? Otherwise they have no reason to have a relationship with me, to do business with me. And even if they do to start, it's destined to fail if they're not getting something, right? Yeah. On the insurance, is insurance a good career path note? What's your answer to that question with just a yes or a no? Absolutely, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I'm having the best year that I've been in business for 13 years. I've had the agency, my agency for 13 years. 2020 is so far the most productive year we've ever had. And that's during a pandemic. Yeah, 2020 is a debacle for most people. Correct. And I say that obviously not for branding purposes to make myself look good. I say it because if you've got a business that can do well during a pandemic, I'd say that's a pretty good career choice. Absolutely. And I started in 2007, and we know what happened to the real estate market and what happened to the economy right after that. And even in those years in 2008, where more than half of my town where my office was completely empty, no businesses, right? It was ghost town. We were growing every year. Why? Because insurance is recession proof. That's why. Yeah. Because everyone still has to have it no matter what. And yes, there might be times when people are buying less cars or they're buying less houses, but there's still millions of cars, houses and lives. If we're talking about life insurance, everyone's still around anyway. They still have to have it, you know? And when times are tough, maybe they shop more, fine. That means I've got more ears that are willing to listen. Yes. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's such a phenomenal story to hear about. And so because if you think about, there's a lot of people considering insurance as a career or not considering insurance career and never would, right? You got both sides of the coin. Yeah. A lot of people are losing their jobs. They're losing their career, if you will, because of everything going on in the world. And you mentioned insurance is a recession proof business. It really is. Like look at this. 100%. Yeah, you just said that your entire team is working, well, I don't know if you said it yet, your entire team is working remote and you're gonna have the best month you've ever had in your career, not the last few months, not this year, not compared to last year, in your career. That's unbelievable. And what do you attribute to that? My team. My team, my team. There he goes, giving it to everybody else again. 100%, 100%. You got a great team, by the way, awesome. Thank you. I agree and I thank them all the time because I can't help myself because I really do appreciate what they do. And I've been in their shoes. I've been a team member for an insurance agency before and it is a juggling act. They can be tedious. It's a lot of work, lots of incoming and expectations. And then when we went remote, you just never know how people are gonna react. Are they gonna up their game? Are there gonna be too many distractions? A lot of pluses and minuses, but that's why I feel very lucky and blessed because my team is very mature and did not think when we went remote that it's all right. Now I'm home and I'm just gonna be watching Netflix and pretending I'm working all day. They're working their butts off. They're working their butts off and our phones ring all day. So we can't, there's no room to be lounging anyway. So they're working their butts off and I just look at my role, a huge part of my role is to make sure that we're communicating on a regular basis. We're meeting on a regular basis. The vision is clear. Our strategy is clear. We are working out our sales muscles every day with role playing and just talking about what's working, what's not working. And so even though we're not physically together, we're zooming every day and we're having the same conversations. And arguably we're having even better meetings virtually than we were before. I mean, again, there's pluses and minuses, but we're just making the time and it's all eyes on each other and we're growing every day. For somebody that's curious about insurance or not doing well, what's the day-to-day look like for one of your team members and then also for you? So sure. So for the team members, it depends on what the role is. I've got team members that are primarily all service and administration. So they are taking incoming calls about billing, billing questions, making changes. That's all service, account management. And then for the sales team, a good portion of their day is either quoting people from incoming referrals, right? Or if they're picking up the phone with existing clients, they're helping them. And we always talk about the plus one, right?  Or need. And so if we see someone has their auto in their home with us and we don't see they have life insurance, we are bringing it up. And we're telling them that it's the most important responsibility that we have. And so we have to be consistent with that. How's the COVID rebuttal I gave you guys? How's that working out? Well, I mean, the numbers speak for themselves. So, I mean, we're doing very well. I think we're still leading our territory in life premium. So for the year so far. So, yeah, so we're doing well with that.  They're selling all day. And when they're not selling, they're also, you know, reaching out to their partners and always making sure that they're in front of them. Not physically these days, but they're always communicating with them so that no one's ever forgotten. Just offered to help, hey, whatever I can do for you. So they're constantly marketing themselves and quoting. All day. And that's a big part of it. And just closing as much business. And we track our activities, you know, how many times are we talking about things? How many quotes have we given? How many sales did we make? You know, how much premium and all of that. And we end every day. One of my team members that's a leader in our team sends out an email to the team, which we call the half, in the middle of the day, we have the halftime report. So that's just, here's where we are halfway for what our goal is.  And then we have an end of day report, which is not exactly when the end of day is. It's about an hour or two before we're truly done, which is to say, we're close. It's like, all right, guys, let's just pick it up a little bit. That's cool. For that last lap, you know. I love that. What are those goals? So we are looking, every team member is looking to get at least one new household per day. All right. So that's how we, we add it up. And sometimes we destroy it. Sometimes, you know, or app count, you know, might be saying, we want at least let's say 10 per day. Sometimes we, you know, you can get seven or eight in a day, you can have, and then the next day might be 17, 18, 20, but we're averaging it out and we've been outpacing our goals. So, but what I don't do, and of course there's all different types of ways of doing this, you know, some people like to make goals so huge, rather than grand cardone, right? Make the goal so big that even if you fall short, you know, you still won, right? You still did a great job. Some sales people don't react well to that, right? They get discouraged and they say, well, I'm so far behind, I'm mentally growing in the flag, right? And they keep going, yeah, yeah. They're going to tell, yeah. And so for us, I don't just, you know, I want to make sure that we have as many wins as possible and that we're always striving to just get a little bit better, a little bit better. So we keep our, our carrot a little closer to us and that carrot eventually gets further and further away, but it's just not starting miles away, you know? Right. And you, yeah, you always do a really good job of keeping the team engaged, which is the most, that's probably the toughest thing of having a sales team and a team in general. How many team members do you have now? Eight. Okay, including you or not including you? Not including me. Okay, and have you, how many have you added? Have you added any since COVID or no? No, not since COVID. I have someone who's, well, I have someone who's starting next month. Oh, good, good. And how many of your sales, how many of your service? I mean, they're all potentially looking for deals, obviously, but what's the breakdown of those eight? Of the eight, you know, you're going to, you're probably going to, you may be surprised by it. Of the eight, it's, I could say four, I could say five their sales because some people have a little bit of, they do both, but we'll call it four or five in sales, the rest of service. I need to, the person that's going to be joining us in July is a sales assistant because we've got one of the greatest problems you could ever have, which is the sales people have too much paperwork, post sale, application work, all of the stuff that happens after, you know, you take money and it's taking them away from more time they could do spending, just closing sales. So I need, you know, and we already do that, you know, they're not, the sales team isn't even doing all the paperwork, but we need to take more off of their desk so that they can just be having the conversation and closing sales all day and just have a little bit more of a factory line approach. It's a good problem to have. Yeah, yeah, it's the best, it's the best. Yeah, we're closing too many deals, you know, that I need someone to help with the paperwork so I can go back and keep closing deals. You know, that's, which that's part of the system that you've created. And what you do an amazing job of is most people struggle with, you mentioned a lot of things people struggle with and some, a lot of things you're doing really well. One thing people struggle with the most is, you know, where's the sale coming from? Right, the prospecting piece, the marketing piece for you. You've got it in a few different ways, but you guys do a good job of really figuring out that piece first so that you have somebody to talk to and that you're busy. I think a lot of agencies like yours don't know where the next sales coming from. Yeah, you know, in my business, a lot of people are buying leads that are sold to all different agents. And so, right, we talked about that, that kind of used to start off with lending tree on the mortgage side, that whole approach they fill out a form and they're getting pounded by a lot of different agents. That is rigorous for a sales person. It is an enormous amount of time hunting down someone that may never answer. And a lot of agents, and there's plenty of agents that do very well with that. It hasn't been our approach. It hasn't been our approach. And no differently than agencies that do extremely well with just straight up telemarketing, right? Awesome, you know. What I have found is more my style and what I found my team is just more comfortable with, which I think makes them more productive and has less burnout, is spending less time hunting individuals and more time developing the relationships, right? So in the life insurance world, there's the expression, right? The line that life insurance agencies used to use back in the day, I think it might have been like a Ben Feldman thing from way, way back in the day. But he would say, if you had a golden goose in your backyard, laying golden eggs, would it make more sense to enter the eggs for the goose, right? And of course, you are the goose, right? And you're making money for your family, so you should be insuring yourself. That's why you need life insurance. And so I applied the same method in terms of marketing and prospecting is, instead of my team spending all their time hunting the eggs, meaning the customers, I want them hunting the relationships and finding their own golden geese that are going to be supplying them with the opportunities, the quoting opportunities all day. So starting off when someone is new to the business, they don't have those relationships and that's why while they're training and while they are doing some, let's say telemarketing or calling leads to get the experience of having conversations, they need to be spending a lot of time finding people who aren't positioned to refer to you and that more importantly, you can add value to them, right? So it can't be, all right, I got to find people who are going to give me stuff. That's the wrong mindset, right?  But to find those people and to start their relationship and maintain it, it has to be, all right, who are the people who aren't positioned to refer to me, but what can I do for them? What is it that I'm doing for them what's helping their business? If you don't have a plan for how you're helping their business and you can articulate it well to them, then there's no reason why they're going to do business with you. You're just another person saying send to me. So you have to be, the way I look at it is to be successful this way, you have to be as good if not better selling how you can help someone else's business than how much you are, how good you are at selling someone on buying insurance or why they should refer to you, right?  Are you working with someone? What works, what doesn't work? All those types of things. Tell me more about the business. And okay, so here's something I could do. What if I could do this for you, right? Or giving the flexibility to say, you know what? I've got partners who they want to have total control in the beginning of, you know, in terms of a referral or you've got other people that say, here's the name and number, just take it. You know, there's, and so we adjust. So we don't go to them and say, here's how we work. We go to them and say, how do you like to work? What would be best for you? You know, and so we allow them to customize the experience with us. And if we're doing it right, we aren't positioned to say, we're doing the service for you and we don't even charge you for it. You know what I mean? It should be that we're so good to them that we would have a right to say, we're going to charge you for this. Even though we're the ones getting the referrals, right? We have to be helping their business so much that we can almost have the right, almost have the right to say, we charge you a fee, but we're not. So explain that. How could you help a referral partner's business? Okay, so let's just, let's use an example of it could be a loan officer, for example, you know, regarding homeowners insurance, right? How am I helping them? How am I helping them, right? Well, their goal is to close on as many loans as possible. Yes. Right? How am I helping them close on the loan? A few different ways is, you know, now everyone can say, listen, I'm quick and I'm cheap. That's what the insurance guys are going to say, right? Quick and I'm cheap. And every single one is going to say that. It's just like you call Verizon, they're going to say, I have the best customer service. You call AT&T, I have the best customer. So everyone says the same thing. So really what is separating you? It starts off with, and this is what I tell my team, it's not going to be as much about your words as it's going to be the feeling that they get from you.  And what I found is, I feel most connected with people who talk to me like a friend, not people who are trying to sound professional and try to say the buzzwords and are clearly speaking script, right? I want a more natural approach. There's that old expression. People used to talk about this in politics. You vote for the person that you feel like you'd want to have a beer with. Well, I feel like that with business. And so when we're talking to them, it's speaking their language and getting really comfortable and winning that likability factor. Because even if you do have the best service and you're in position to do the best for them, they don't care. They're not going to be able to see past the fact that they don't like you, right? So we have to be winning them over and talking about their business. The more they talk about their business, the more they're going to like us and the more we learn, what are their buttons? What is it that they need, right? What's going to make them happy? What's going to help their business? So in many cases, that might just be the fact that we offer truly, you know, our reliability and our availability trumps most of our competition. It's because most of our competition is not taking a call, they're going to run a quote for you at 10 p.m. tonight. I can guarantee you, so on my team, if given the opportunity, we'll run a quote on everything you need at 10 p.m. tonight, all right? So most mortgage brokers aren't doing that. So that's a separator, all right? And then the other is in terms of coverages and working with banks, sometimes for a loan officer, the trouble might be, amen, we need to have this much coverage because that's what the bank requires, but we need to get the price down here. And so we're going to work with the client and we're going to make sure that we are, you know, looking at all of their options to make sure that we can get the price that they need. And quite frankly, if after the closing, we have to bump things back up, right? Or make certain changes so that we both satisfy what the bank needs, but never sacrifice the proper coverage for the client. And then we're going to do that, but we're going to work with them to make sure that, you know, that the loan is closed and the client is happy. And that the other part is that if their client, if the loan officer's client, if the car sales person's client, if they are not going back to them and saying, thank you for referring JR or any one of my team members, if we're not making them look good, then we didn't do their job, you know? So we talk about that, but it's so much more based, I just feel like it's so much more based on getting to know someone with it before you even talk business, you know? And the feeling of it. And that's just how we do all of our business. It's less scripted, and it's more about being your authentic self, which is kind of a popular term a lot lately, right? But I just feel that that's how we sell everything is I want everyone to feel totally comfortable being themselves. So they don't have to think about what they're gonna say. They just speak from the heart and just say, what can I do to help you?  Yeah, because they're comfortable and they trust you. And that's such a huge factor that dwarfs having the right words, right? I hope people are taking notes because you are dropping some absolute gold right now. I'm telling you, for someone wanting to scale an insurance agency and really launch this thing, you've mentioned a lot of amazing things about how many referrals, inbound leads, or whatever you wanna call them, do you and your team see per day or per week or per month? Let's take a look here. Well, it certainly varies from day to day because we are putting a lot of stock in the volume from our referral partners, right? So just for example, on the auto-intern side, when the COVID hit New York really bad, right? When that hit, the dealerships were shut down. Yes. So no one could buy a car. Yes. And the DMV was shut down, so no one could register a car. Even if they were buying from a family member, things were just shut down. So that hit us in April. So in April, we took a punch because it had nothing to do with our ability or our strategy, it just had to be that our referral partners were essentially shut down. Yeah. But on any given day, we've got, let's say each person, I've got one team member who easily, I mean, it's normal that she's getting 12 referrals in a day. Oh, that's freaking great. That's 12 quotes, right? With not one outgoing phone call to make it happen. Right? And so that's what I'm talking about in terms of you have to hunt the geese. That's unbelievable, bro. Like that's freaking crazy. I'm like... Yeah. You know, others might be getting two, three or four based on how new they are and how long they've been doing it. But we talk about is that it's the snowball, right?  You haven't been doing this long enough. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's hard to fake that you're not really an expert sometimes. Yeah, you take some time before you're going to get that trust from people. But eventually you get one or two. I was talking to my team this morning, right? So I've got one team member, the one I just referenced to, you know, on any given day could easily get 12, right? Oh yeah, I know definitely 12. Right? And part of the reason why that's happened is because when she started a relationship with one organization, with one individual, that individual was so happy that he told his coworker, who told his coworker and coworker. And then before you know it, you've got eight people in this organization who all love us and they're all referring. So now you got, you know, it's eight people all from one company referring to us. So it spreads. You do a good job. The word spreads.  But it works on the, you know, on the institutional side of it as well. But most people are, most people hear 12 to inbound to one person, they're never going to believe it. But, and I can use but because I'm meaning to erase what I just said, because I've been in your office and I've seen it firsthand. Like you've took their phone and showed me like here's another one, you know? And I'm like, it was amazing to see, like it was fun. And that's one of the reasons why people just need to, like that's why I love putting people like you on here. Because people need to hear from people like JR that are doing big things and understand what's going on in the world, understand that entrance agents are struggling during, entrance agents struggle in general. They're struggling even more during this and it shouldn't be the case.  I got a few more minutes. What's something or a couple of things that you want to, if you're out there talking to a new agent or someone that's considering insurance or someone that's struggling, maybe they're in one of those three buckets.  What's that look like and what's some tips and feedback that you can give to those different people? Well, because insurance is a product that everyone has, it's commonly referred to as a commodity. And the average customer, that's how they think of it. It's all the same, who's got the best price. So most of the conversations begin with the customer having that philosophy. And so to be successful, whether it's growing your own agency, whether teaching your agents below you of what the sales process is and how those conversations go, it has to be designed to minimize the price factor, dissolve it as much as possible so that when you finally get to the price, because we eventually have to make an offer, they're thinking, damn, I thought it was gonna be a lot more, even if it is more than what they're currently paying. We should be beefing up the value so much that the person's just happy you weren't double what they're currently paying. Yes. And so you need to have the volume of opportunity. So you have to develop those relationships so that you have people to speak with. And if you don't, then you just have to hit the phones. Whether it's phones, it's social media and your relationships or it's networking groups, all of that sort of stuff to have people to speak with. And even if it's social gatherings at nights and weekends, they all have insurance. They all have a roof over their head or most of them drive a car. So everyone's a potential client of referral source. There's no doubt about it. But once you have the opportunity, then it's just a matter of, well, what do you do with it? Yeah. And the one thing that we cannot, we have no control over and agents have to have the right mindset with this is we have no control over what the price is going to be from the insurance carrier, no control. And we don't know what it is while we're talking to them. Up until the point where you press that calculate button, you don't know what number is going to come up. You might have a hint that it's going to be kind of bad if they say I had three accidents and all that sort of stuff. But you have no idea what the price is. And even if the price is terrible, if it's really high, it's all relative. So we may tell somebody, well, your insurance is $700 a month. And most people in the United States would say, are you kidding me? You should be riding a bicycle. Why would you spend $700 on insurance?  So now it's really, now it's a really good deal. So it's all relative, right? Totally. But what I talked to my team about is, I have this thing where I call it's the red zone, the yellow zone and the green zone. All right? When they give, when they run the quote and they're building the value the whole time, they press that calculate button. If the price comes up and we're hundreds of dollars more, right? It's in the red zone. It's okay. You're not gonna make that sale. It ain't happening. Okay? Move on. I don't want you dwelling on it.  Move on. And set a date to follow up because maybe a claim falls off, a ticket falls off. But we're moving on. We're not gonna make the sale today. It's not a good offer. Fine. And on the, all the way on the other side you got the green zone, which is we're less money, we're giving more coverage. This is a no-brainer. 10 out of 10 should be sold. Right? Yeah. The yellow zone that I think separates the men from the boys as they say. Right? All right. It's the yellow zone. It's where maybe you're only $5 less or maybe you're $10 more. You're in the zone where if it's all based on price there, they're not looking to move. Yeah. Right?  Why am I gonna give all this information? Why do I have to deal with paperwork? You're not even really saving me that much anyway. Well, the only way that they're gonna do that is that if they're thinking they'll get a huge upgrade. Right? Yeah. So, you know, if you drive an average vehicle, let's just say it's a Toyota and someone says, well, you can have a Mercedes and it's only, your payment's only gonna be $10 more a month, then most people wouldn't make that leap. Yep. Why? Because it's such a huge upgrade. It's such a great value. So we have to win the yellow zone. So we concentrate all on winning the yellow zone. Right? Which is when it's not blatantly obvious that they should be switching because we're just saving them a ton of money, how do you make sure that they perceive the value to be so great that they are hopping on that up, you know, hopping on and giving us their business? That's awesome. That's awesome. I'm gonna do something unique as we close out. There's gonna be agency owner that listen to this that says, dude, I want one of my reps to get 240 inbound referrals a month, you know. Is it okay if they email me, Cody at Codyaskins.com and then I get the three of us on a three-way call? Yeah, of course. Okay, I wanna do that just because there's gonna be people that out there that need that, that maybe would like to spend an hour with you to really learn how they can use massive success in their agency and really ramp that up. Any thoughts there? Yeah, well, I'd love to help out. I think that there's a lot of agents who are struggling with old school methods. I mean, and there's agents who crush it with the old school methods, but for the ones who aren't doing well with the old school methods, what I do might be a great fix, you know, because it works for us. And in my belief, and I know my team agrees with me, they much prefer spending their day stressed out about getting to all the quotes they have to do rather than stressed out about where am I gonna get my next quote? Yeah, that's unbelievable. You know what I mean? That's awesome. So for an agent that says, you know what, I don't wanna make 300 calls a day. That makes me miserable.  Then I got no problem getting on a call with you and someone else and kind of talking a little bit more details about how we get that done. Yes, yes. Awesome, buddy. Thank you very much. That's huge.  And I gotta meet this guy, you know, email me, Cody at Cody Askins. I'll set up a call.  Dude, you are doing bigger things than you realize. You get an incredible team.  Thanks, man. And thank you for spending some time with us and sharing all the secrets of why insurance is a good career path, how you can launch your career and how you can scale an agency. Yeah, I appreciate it and I appreciate all your support. And it's great to have you as a friend and it's awesome to be on the podcast. Thank you, bro. Appreciate it, buddy. Thank you guys for watching.  I got five books that every new insurance agent should read, go watch that, grab the books, see over there. When you read a book, when you go to an event, when you listen to a book, when you go to a mastermind, when you buy a universe,


Well, as thank you for this introduction and as Mike mentioned in February this year, Switzerland hosted the Global Ministerial Summit on Patient Safety. 86 ministerial delegations came to Montreux and I'm happy to share with you the core messages that were presented to the ministers and I've been invited to also share my thoughts about the way forward. So here you can see the context and atmosphere of the ministerial day. You can see the ministers sitting at the roundtables at the front and the patient safety experts sitting at the back with prestigious speakers, such as WHO Director General, such as the President of Switzerland, such as the founder of the Patient Safety Movement Foundation and the picture of the ministers in Montreux. Day one is a gathering of the experts with 15 panels identifying, collecting, debating the proposed messages for the ministers and at the end of day one two of us managed the prioritization process and we delivered these messages to the ministers on the beginning of day two. So I would like to review with you these core messages that were presented to the ministers. The first one is that an enormous burden of harm remains linked to unsafe care. Despite efforts in several domains, according to WHO, one in ten patients gets harmed receiving care. Fifteen percent of hospital expenditure is a result of adverse events and one in 20 patients suffers avoidable medication harm. So patient safety is a global health priority that requires urgent action from countries, from institutions and from providers. There are many prevention and mitigation solutions, but they are only partly or unsystematically applied. During COVID-19, pandemic-related safety gaps were added to the existing gaps. For example, inadequate infection prevention measures, misuse of antibiotics, unsafe medication practices, increased pressure injuries and medical supply issues. There is hope, however, as the global patient safety movement is showing momentum. Patient safety has been recognized by the global health priority by the World Health Assembly. The Global Patient Safety Action Plan from WHO is the first ever global roadmap for moving towards zero avoidable harm. Does this mean we can rest? Well, certainly not. Science has brought us an expanding body of knowledge and evidence to prevent harm. The trouble is that a lot of it does not reach the patients. Adding to the harm of patients, the pandemic led to avoidable direct harm to hundreds of thousands of health care workers around the world. We have learned that there is no patient safety without health care worker safety. In 2015, we found in a study in the western Switzerland that hand hygiene compliance was 60% of the total health care workers. Hand hygiene compliance was 62%. At the same time, we surveyed the staff who believed that hand hygiene compliance was 87%. Yes, until we measure our compliance to best practice, we tend to overestimate our performance. Research shows that it takes on average 17 years from the scientific discovery that improves safety until it is implemented in routine clinical practice. So let's face it. We have a chronic weakness on implementation. Our major weakness is not our lack of knowledge. It is our lack of ability to systematically and reliably implement the knowledge at our disposal. We are very much in need for new knowledge around best practices for the process of implementation. During COVID-19, rapid implementation proved possible in service delivery transformations, vaccines development, and digital literacy, for example. So implementation science is the scientific study of methods to promote the systematic uptake of research findings and other evidence-based practices into routine practice. It takes us through steps to understand one who needs to do what differently Two, what factors determine whether they do it or not. Three, which strategies are effective to target these factors. And four, how can we measure outcomes? While there are no magic bullets and nothing works well all the time, the key to effective implementation is to support actors to change their behavior. Behavioral science, for example, provides practical means to achieve faster and more effective change. The discussions during the expert day have highlighted the need for healthcare systems to have a clear strategy on building capacity and capability for patient safety improvement and change. Sustaining improvements requires building capacity and capability such as teamwork, human factors training, leadership skills, data literacy, safety culture, monitoring and feedback. Organizations and nations need a capability plan. And by the way, building capacity and capability also applies to governance bodies, to regulators and to government. COVID-19 emphasized the crucial role of leadership, of including safety and quality in governance bodies, of data availability and of a culture of data informed decision making. The governance of the macro system is important to support patient safety implementation and create a fertile ground. A key role of governance is to set the direction and vision in partnership with stakeholders, allowing the work to be led locally. The basis of safety governance must be what is best for the patient, whose perspective should be included in the design of governance models. Governance should foster a culture of openness and trust amongst health professionals. Political leadership should keep putting patient safety at the top of its health policy agenda and should ensure implementation of patient safety strategies. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries have observed declining levels of trust in government. Misinformation and disinformation have at times obstructed the delivery of safe care. The pandemic also exposed long-standing health inequities impacting patient safety. The scope of patient safety governance should include all healthcare sectors and settings, including primary care, mental health, home care, etc. Research and implementation in patient safety strategies have often started at the hospital. Risks are different in primary care, home care, mental health, but risks are there. Research and improvement programs are needed in these fields. Nations should assess the state of patient safety in mental health, be it in the community or in health facilities. Patients with mental health conditions have unique vulnerabilities and their safety matters. And let's not forget that in the expression patient safety, there is the word patient. We need to go beyond doing things for the patient and start doing much more with the patient. We need to partner with patients. COVID-19 was a very noisy pandemic. Let's not forget all the silent pandemics that continue to spread every day, such as healthcare-associated infections, antimicrobial resistance, and unsafe patient care. So these are the key messages that were presented to the ministers in Montreux. I've been invited as the last slide to conclude with my thoughts about the way forward. I believe we should widen our definition of harm and include psychological harm, dehumanization, delayed or inadequate diagnosis in the definition of harm. Culture drives behavior. We should make sure that we lead culture change for patient safety. And to do this, we must walk the talk. We should heavily invest in staff safety, staff well-being, and psychological safety. We should take a leap in partnering with patients and carers, not just doing things for the patient, but doing things with patients. We need to develop interprofessional teamwork for patient safety. Compliance approaches are the first step, but resilience approaches are also needed. We have to start managing risks on a patient pathway, not just in a single ward or in a single institution. We need to invest more in building capacity and capability for patient safety in infrastructure, in nurturing the ground on which patient safety will grow. And finally, we have a responsibility to embed patient safety in the governance process at the country level, at the major level, and in the micro system. Thank you.