Errors healthcare industry

More recently, the healthcare industry has come under fire for sloppy, low-quality operations leading to medical errors. For example, the physician s scrawl on a prescription may be illegible. This leaves the process... 

The Council encourages collaboration among industry, regulators, standards-setters, healthcare professionals, and patients to facilitate design of packaging and labeling to help minimize errors. 

To increase awareness of the importance of medication errors among healthcare professionals, institutions, organizations, the pharmaceutical industry, the patients themselves, and throughout the entire healthcare system, and to build a safety culture of commitment to medication error reporting and prevention. 

Compared with manufacturing industry, healthcare has little standardization, comparatively little monitoring of processes and outcome, and few safeguards against error and other quality problems (Bates, 2000). Most healthcare processes were not designed, but just evolved and adapted to circumstances. A particular... 

The idea of teaching specific safety attitudes and behaviours is unusual in healthcare but deeply embedded in a number of hazardous industries. For instance, the Western Mining Corporation in Western Australia is an exemplar of creating error wisdom within its organization and front line staff. Their motto is Take time, take charge, which aims to get workers to stop and think, to... 

While human reliabihty analysis (HRA) has been well established and integrated into safety analysis in other industries (nuclear, aviation...) its application to healthcare is limited (Lyons, et.al. 2004). HRA studies human operator performance in the context of a specific task enviromnent. It is often focused on estimating the probability of human error, and how this probability might increase or decrease when coupled with various performance shaping factors. 

In addition to the complexity of healthcare itself, there is a lot of incident factors communication errors between doctors andnurses, problems in hospital management, misunderstanding of patients, and so on. Theses factors are not only of types common to ordinary industries, but also of types characteristic in healthcare. 

Safety and risk management research in healthcare has adopted as its dominant trend the systems oriented approach, modelled largely on previous research in safely critical industries such as aviation and nuclear power. The systems view entails that the focus is not primarily on the mechanisms of individual human error but on the factors that shape human performance (Rasmussen 1986 Reason 1993,1997). In an organisational context, such factors are, of course, those that are within the control of the organisation. For instance, it has been suggested that quahty and safety are affected not only by operators professional and technical competence and skills, but also by their attitudes to and perceptions of their job roles, their organisation and management (Helmreich and Merritt 1998). Such employee attitudes and views are important elements which shape safety cirlture - and its related notion safety climate . Indeed, survey studies have shown that staff attitudes are important indices of safety performance not only in human-machine system domains such as railway operations and constmction (e.g. Itoh and Andersen 1999 Itoh et al. 2004 Silva et al. 2004) but also in healthcare (e.g. Colla et al. 2005 Itoh and Andersen 2010). 

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