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thumbnail of Healthcare versus industrial safety – the impact of cognitive distortion

Author
Nick Woodier, Paul Sampson, & Iain Moppett
Abstract
Healthcare has long been told that it must improve patient safety. To help improvement, there are repeated calls that it should seek to learn from other industries, such as aviation and nuclear, including around their use of near misses. Near misses are incidents that almost happened, and it is believed that learning from near misses can help avoid harmful incidents. This study, part of a larger project, aimed to understand industrial perceptions of their own safety and translation of safety ideas to healthcare, with a focus on near misses. A qualitative approach was undertaken with a scoping review and interviews with 35 participants across aviation, maritime, nuclear, and rail. Participants had reservations about healthcare translating safety ideas from their industries, with perceptions that healthcare is oversimplifying safety management, including how they learn from near misses. Healthcare may be prone to all-or-nothing thinking, limiting its ability to take evidence-based approaches to improving safety. Healthcare may benefit from considering and implementing safety management principles.