Understanding and Preventing Human Error

Medical errors can cause preventable injuries, death, and even lead to permanent life changing injuries. Sitting around and doing nothing is not an option. However we all need to understand and use three key tools to determine the causes of medical errors and to fix them, Root cause analysis, Driver Diagrams, and PDSA cycles.

Small errors and our tendency to ignore and workaround them. Unfortunately this approach to small problems is one of leading causes for the continued high rate of preventable injuries and deaths in our hospitals and clinics. It is time to fix the little things.

Differentiating random or common cause from specific cause variation .and using the concept of reliability will help with dramatically improving the reliability in health care toward reducing human errors by utilizing different interventions. Health systems and providers can utilize different strategies to help patients and families to prevent inadvertent injuries or deaths.

We All Can Lead: Becoming an Adaptive Leader