Patient Safety 2.0: Slaying dragons, not just investigating them (September 2023)

Summary

In this article for the Journal of Patient Safety, Alan Card from the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, argues that the purpose of patient safety work is to reduce avoidable patient harm, and this requires us to slay dragons—to eliminate or at least mitigate risks to patients. He expresses the view that current practice focuses almost exclusively on investigating dragons—tracking reports on the number and type of dragons that appear, how many villagers they eat and where, whether they live in caves or forests and so on. He argues that while information about risks is useful to the extent that it informs effective action, it does nothing to make patients safer by itself: "We cannot investigate a dragon to death. No more can we risk assess our way to safer care."