Rethinking healthcare as a safety-critical industry

Summary

 The discipline of ergonomics, or human factors engineering, has made substantial contributions to both the development of a science of safety, and to the improvement of safety in a wide variety of hazardous industries, including nuclear power, aviation, shipping, energy extraction and refining, military operations, and finance. It is notable that healthcare, which in most advanced societies is a substantial sector of the economy and has been associated with large volumes of potentially preventable morbidity and mortality, has not up to now been viewed as a safety critical industry. This paper from Robert L Wears proposes that improving safety performance in healthcare must involve a re-envisioning of healthcare itself as a safety-critical industry, but one with considerable differences from most engineered safety-critical systems. This has implications both for healthcare, and for conceptions of safety-critical industries.