Summary
Healthcare can be risky. Adverse events carry a high cost – both human and financial – for health systems around the world. So in an effort to improve safety, many health systems have looked to learn from high-risk industries.
The aviation and nuclear industries, for example, have excellent safety records despite operating in hazardous conditions. And increasingly, the tools and procedures these industries use to identify hazards are being adopted in healthcare.
One prominent example involves the Hierarchy of Risk Controls (HoC) approach, which works by ranking the methods of controlling risks based on their expected effectiveness. According to HoC, the risks at the top are presumed to be more effective than those at the bottom. The ones at the top typically rely less on human behaviour: for example, a new piece of technology is considered to be a stronger risk control than training staff.
This article looks more deeply at the (HoC) approach to explore its usefulness and effectiveness in healthcare. To investigate this issue, a team of social scientists examined the risk controls introduced by four hospital teams in England and Scotland after they had identified hazards in their systems.
Content
Findings:
- Most of these risk controls – 35 out of 42 – would be classified as ‘administrative’ by the HoC, and thus considered weak.
- The risk controls that fell into this ‘administrative’ category included training, standardising processes and procedures, and changing the design and organisation of care.
- Since other evidence shows these approaches can sometimes be very successful in healthcare, it is probably a mistake to automatically assume they are weak.
- Completely eliminating reliance on human behaviour is very difficult in the healthcare context and would introduce new risks.
- A rigid hierarchical approach to classifying risks may not be right for healthcare. Caution is needed before abandoning apparently weak interventions.
- Learning from other industries may be useful, but it is not always straightforward.
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