Health professionals dedicate their lives to the care of patients. Most are highly trained and competent; however, the nature of health care is extremely complex, and people, despite good intentions, are still capable of making errors.
Although hospitals, clinics, and doctor’s offices take many steps to keep their patients safe, medical errors can, and do, occur. Rather than penalize individuals who make honest mistakes, the goal of patient safety is to redesign systems to be more fool-proof and able to compensate for human error.
Bad Apples/Blame Culture: When a medical error occurs, the bad apple approach seeks to identify who is responsible for the error and take punitive action against that individual. However, this approach does not improve safety. It creates a culture of fear and doesn’t address the root cause of the error.
Only 5% of patient harm is due directly to incompetence or poor intentions. People need to be accountable, but systems changes are needed to truly transform care. Unfortunately, health care has a long tradition of a blame culture. Blaming people who make errors does not get to underlying causes or help to prevent the error from happening to someone else in the future.
The most effective approach to reducing harm from medical error is to find out how the error happened, rather than who did it, and then fix the system to prevent errors from causing injury to patients. Improvements in patient safety will be hindered as long as there is a focus on blaming individuals.