HOBART | Bob Malizzo knows that to make sure others benefit from his daughter's death, he must talk about it. Time has passed, but it's still difficult to discuss his daughter, Michelle Malizzo Ballog, who went in to the hospital for routine surgery, was put to sleep — and never woke up.

"It's always hard. We live it again. But it's something that has to get done. So, we get through it," Malizzo said.

Malizzo, his wife, Barbara Malizzo, and their other daughter, Kristina Malizzo Chavez, talk about Michelle as their way of ensuring her death was not in vain. Working with the University of Illinois at Chicago, where the procedure was done, the family is making it a point to bring a family's perspective to hospital practices when they sit in on the monthly safety review board meetings.

The family also has spoken at seminars across the country about their experience, and how the hospital's admitting the medical error led to a safety partnership, all without any lawsuits filed.

Michelle, then 39, went into surgery in 2008 for a "simple" liver procedure, Bob Malizzo said. Shortly after, the doctor came out and said everything had gone wrong. She died after nine days on a ventilator, leaving behind her husband and two daughters as well as her parents and sister.

"We were able to determine within the first 48 hours we had information that wouldn’t be part of the medical record that we felt obligated to share with ya’ll," said Dr. Timothy McDonald, chief safety and risk officer for health affairs for the University of Illinois, to Malizzo in a recording of a November webinar about the partnership. "Because it showed we could have done things better. We had made mistakes, and those mistakes had led to the tragic outcome."

Bob Malizzo said the family wasn't interested in suing. Instead, it wanted prevention, and the family was asked to participate on the safety review board to review near-misses and incidents at other hospitals to determine how to prevent their happening at UIC.

"When (they) show up, how powerful those meetings become because their presence. They serve and work as the conscience of the community," McDonald said at the webinar. "It's a great meeting to have them at. ... From my ... selfish perspective, the partnership has been huge in terms of getting the organization to continue to focus on safety issues and harm issues."

Today the trust between Bob Malizzo and the hospital is so strong, Malizzo is a patient there.

"Mistakes are going to happen," Malizzo said. "But what we want to do is minimize the mistakes and learn from them."