A (contrarian) guest post from Dr. Bob Wachter on KevinMD:
When the patient safety field began a decade ago with the publication of the IOM report on medical errors, one of its first thrusts was to import lessons from “safer” industries, particularly aviation. Most of these lessons – a focus on bad systems more than bad people, the importance of teamwork, the use of checklists, the value of simulation training – have served us well.
But one lesson from aviation has proved to be wrong, and we are continuing to suffer from this medical error. It was an unquestioning embrace of using incident reporting (IR) systems to learn about mistakes and near misses.
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