The mythbuster: Blaming people will not make the NHS safer (HSJ, 29 August 2023)

Summary

The majority of safety failures in the NHS are caused by bad systems not by malicious or incompetent staff, writes Steve Black in this HSJ opinion piece.

The Letby case has provoked plenty of discussion of the way the NHS handles safety critical issues. But there were some hints that the way the case was handled was too typical of how the NHS thinks about safety issues both culturally and procedurally. One part of the issue is how the system resists ideas that work elsewhere, the other is how the standard approach to problems makes learning hard and vastly increases the expense of handling safety errors.