Making invisible medical risks visible.
The Hoffmann Goldsword Foundation is a public safety and education initiative built on a simple premise: systems cannot prevent what they are not designed to see. We exist to change what healthcare systems are designed to notice — so that patients are protected, clinicians are informed, and the gaps that allow serious harm to go unrecognized are finally closed.
A preventable risk with no system to catch it
The Foundation was born from a family's direct experience with a medical system that could not see a risk it had not been designed to look for. A life-threatening allergy to chlorhexidine gluconate — one of the most widely used antiseptics in modern healthcare — went undetected, untracked, and undocumented until it nearly proved fatal.
What followed was more than a year of investigation, research, and consultation that revealed not a failure of individual care, but a structural one. The risks were real. The evidence existed. The system simply had no mechanism to connect them in time.
The Hoffmann Goldsword Foundation exists to build that mechanism — through education, advocacy, and open collaboration with the clinical and research communities who have the power to change how care is delivered.
“We are not here to assign blame. We are here to make sure the next patient who walks into a surgical setting with an unrecognized CHG allergy doesn’t have to rebuild the safety system themselves — in real time, from a hospital waiting room.”
The future this foundation is building toward
Success, for us, looks specific. It looks like intake forms that ask about grooming practices before surgery. It looks like CHG listed clearly on every product that contains it. It looks like a dedicated ICD code that allows clinicians to track, flag, and learn from chlorhexidine reactions across the healthcare system. It looks like hospitals with established CHG-free surgical pathways — so that a patient with a confirmed, life-threatening allergy is never again told that no facility in their region can safely perform the procedure they need.
These are not radical changes. They are the natural result of making an existing, documented risk visible to the systems that were always meant to prevent it.
Informed clinicians
Every care provider understands that CHG allergy exists, how to recognize it, and how to plan around it before a procedure begins.
Trackable data
A dedicated diagnostic code means CHG reactions are recorded, counted, and visible — not absorbed into catch-all categories where patterns disappear.
Safer intake
Pre-surgical assessments routinely ask about grooming practices, chemical sensitivities, and prior reactions — capturing risk before it becomes crisis.
Accessible care
No patient with a documented CHG allergy should have to search the country for a single facility willing and able to treat them safely.
Survivor-led. Evidence-bound.
The Foundation is survivor-led — meaning our work is grounded in the lived experience of navigating a system that could not see the risk it was creating. That experience is irreplaceable. It tells us where the gaps are, what questions to ask, and what patients actually face when documentation fails them.
But lived experience is not where our work ends. Every claim we make is governed by evidence, documentation, and restraint. We do not overstate what is known. We do not assign fault to individuals. We focus on patterns — the structural, repeatable conditions that allow serious harm to occur — because that is where prevention lives.
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We move at the pace the evidence supports. Getting it right matters more than getting it out fast.
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Our focus is upstream — on the intake questions, documentation practices, and protocols that stop harm before it reaches a patient.
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Risks that are known but unnamed cannot be acted on. Naming them clearly is the first act of prevention.
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We focus on the systems and structures that allow harm to occur — not the individuals working within them.
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Educational materials produced by the Foundation are freely available for non-commercial use, adaptation, and sharing. Prevention should not sit behind a paywall.
This work belongs to more than one community
The risks the Foundation addresses do not belong to a single specialty, institution, or patient population. They live at the intersection of surgery, allergy, anesthesia, nursing, pharmacy, and patient advocacy. So does our work.
Patients & Families
If you or someone you love has experienced an unexplained perioperative reaction, or carries a CHG allergy into a healthcare system not built to accommodate it — this foundation was built with you in mind.
Clinicians
We are not here to criticize clinical practice. We are here to support it — with clear, evidence-based resources that make CHG risk easier to recognize, document, and prevent.
Hospitals & Researchers
Whether you are building clinical protocols or studying the epidemiology of perioperative anaphylaxis, the gaps are the same: too little data, too few documented cases, and no standardized pathway for patients who need one. We want to work alongside the institutions and researchers ready to change that.
Donors & Supporters
Your support funds education, advocacy, and the unglamorous infrastructure of systems change — the research, outreach, and sustained presence this work requires to move institutions.
This is only the beginning.
The Hoffmann Goldsword Foundation is new. The work ahead is significant. But the need is documented, the evidence is real, and the people building this have lived inside the problem long enough to understand exactly where the gaps are.
If you believe that a risk this serious — this present, this preventable — should not remain invisible, we'd like to hear from you.
About the foundation.
The Hoffmann Goldsword Foundation was established in 2025 by Ken Hoffmann and Katherine Goldsword following Katherine's near-fatal perioperative anaphylactic reaction to chlorhexidine gluconate. The Foundation operates as a public safety and education initiative, governed by principles of accuracy, transparency, and open knowledge.
The Foundation is not affiliated with any hospital system, pharmaceutical company, or litigation effort. Its work is independent, evidence-based, and focused entirely on prevention and education.
Public educational materials produced by the Hoffmann Goldsword Foundation are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA) license unless otherwise noted. Materials may be shared and adapted for non-commercial use with attribution, provided adaptations are shared under the same terms.