Resilient healthcare: turning patient safety on its head (August 2015)

Summary

The current approach to patient safety, labelled Safety-I, is predicated on a ‘find and fix’ model. It identifies things going wrong, after the event, and aims to stamp them out, in order to ensure that the number of errors is as low as possible. Healthcare is much more complex than such a linear model suggests.

This article, published by the International Journal for Quality in Health Care, argues that we need to switch the focus to what we have come to call Safety-II, a concerted effort to enable things to go right more often. The key is to appreciate that healthcare is resilient to a large extent, and everyday performance succeeds much more often than it fails.