Healthcare quality and patient safety have recently entered the public discourse and garnered increasing attention from leaders in medicine. Most don't realize that medical errors claim thousands of lives each year.
The errors have been largely blamed on systemic issues such as technical flaws, poor coordination, lack of safety nets, and insurance fragmentation. Healthcare is a high-risk industry. And while healthcare providers are dedicated, they're ultimately human, and humans are certainly prone to making mistakes.
The Swiss cheese model of accident causation is frequently used to describe how healthcare institutions can reduce the rate of avoidable complications. This model describes the benefits of layered security, likening human nature to several slices of Swiss cheese. The different layers of defenses can cumulatively prevent a failure from passing through the entire system, with such failures represented by the holes in the cheese.
Current structural flaws are compounded by the immense pressures placed on frontline clinicians. Employees balance their obligations to patients who need attentive care with pressure from administrators who demand rapid, efficient work that cuts costs and maximizes profits.
Unfortunately, the reality is that institutions frequently take punitive measures against clinicians who may work too slowly while incentivizing those who see more patients or conduct more procedures.
