Addressing adverse events in health care through a safety science lens

Abstract Despite over nearly two decades of intense attention, funding, and research on patient safety and adverse events in health care, rates of reported patient harm have failed to improve. Many thousands of patients die every year as a result of serious and largely preventable safety events or medical errors. This lack of progress, in spite of financial and human resources devoted to fix the problem at the local, state, and national levels, suggests that the methods we are currently employing to solve our patient safety problem simply are not working. Notably, the issues related to safety in health care are not a reflection of poor performance or ill will of healthcare professionals. In fact, healthcare professionals come to work to help patients but are often put in an environment that fails them and their patients, and the traditional strategies we have used to solve these systemic problems in health care have not been successful. The purpose of this chapter is to explore background theories and methods of safety science that can be applied to examine safety events in health care, examine the current state of applying safety science in health care, and provide recommendations to further improve the use of safety science in health care.