Safety or a blame culture?

[richard steyn]

Approaches that focus on punishing individuals instead of changing systems provide strong incentives for people to report only those errors they cannot hide. Thus, a punitive approach shuts off the information that is needed to identify faulty systems and create safer ones. In a punitive system, no one learns from their mistakes

Leape, 2000

This was in his testimony before congress.

Lucian Leape, MD, is a member of the Quality of Health Care in America Committee at the Institute of Medicine and adjunct professor of the Harvard School of Public Health.

[richard steyn]

For many years, the Just Culture concept has proved effective in error reduction and improvement in safety in aviation and other industries where errors have dire and sometimes catastrophic repercussions. The Just Culture concept is an ideal fit for health care systems, where errors have just as serious consequences. By promoting system improvements over individual punishment, a Just Culture in healthcare does much to improve patient safety, reduce errors, and give nurses and other health care workers a major stake in the improvement process.

http://nursingworld.org/psjustculture