Competent professionals can make mistakes .
Most adverse events have multiple underlying causes and more attention needs to be paid to those underlying causes. We support confidential, non-punitive safety reporting systems because this approach has been proven to be effective in healthcare and other industries and we believe that the interest of the public can best be served by adopting the most effective methods available to improve patient safety. Reports are used for learning and improvement rather than punishment. Reports are made to a non-regulatory, independent organization or organizations with access to expertise in patient safety and systems improvement. Adequate resources are provided and feedback mechanisms are implemented to facilitate the exchange of knowledge, encourage learning from reported errors, and lead to the implementation of safe delivery systems that minimize the risk of human and technical error.