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I wrote this essay years ago, but have been thinking about the issue alot during these difficult times.  As we face this coronavirus crisis, some people are jumping in, working […]

I’m writing this blogpost from the Delta airplane that I’m traveling on to Detroit to speak at a patient safety conference in Windsor, Canada. I’ve been wanting to write about […]

For the past fifteen years, since the Institute of Medicine published its report To Err Is Human, patient safety has become the watchword of the day. Money has been spent.  […]

Healthcare is steeped in  hierarchy, obsessed with leadership (as in everyone wants to be a leader and no one wants to be a follower/team member(but more on that in a […]

I’ve been thinking a lot more lately about the concepts of Emotional Intelligence and Team Intelligence, which is something I’ve written about in First Do Less Harm: Confronting the [...]

When we discuss the feasibility of team training in health care, many medical professionals insist that the aviation safety model can never be applied to the healthcare workplace.  Why?  Because [...]

In their book Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity, Karl  E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe outline the characteristics of a High Reliability Organization [...]

News that hospital patients in Minnesota are no safer today than a decade ago comes as no surprise to those trying to reduce medical errors and injuries. The drive to […]

I am delighted to let readers of this blog know about our new book, Beyond the Checklist: What Else Health Care Can Learn from Aviation Safety and Teamwork, which was […]

In her December 20th blogpost on WonkBlog, Sarah Kliff reports on a study from the Journal Surgery which documents that surgeons have left 4,857 objects in patients over the last […]