We need to rethink our approach to patient safety

Dr Suzette Woodward describes in her latest book a more positive approach to patient safety that seeks to learn how things normally happen in order to understand why they failed in that instance.

"The book aims to provide a significantly more positive approach to patient safety because it moves people away from focusing people on their shortcomings, which doesn’t enable learning, it in fact impairs it.  It also moves us away from spending all of our time identifying failure as we see it and giving people feedback about how to avoid it, telling them to stop making mistakes."

"The book also provides examples of how we can move from the rhetoric to action including the extremely useful methods for how we can study work-as-done and the adjustments and adaptions people make every day."

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Source: HSJ, 7 October 2019