The importance of preventable errors has been brought home by surveys showing that they impose major burdens on health services, and may injure or even kill thousands of patients a year. These episodes are also expensive. The question left begging is how to prevent what has been called serious medical error. This is not a pejorative phrase. It is not intended to blame individuals, but rather a complaint that healthcare professionals are too often expected to do too much with too few tools.
Most errors result from failure to use basic human factors in the design of tasks and systems.
Excessive reliance on memory, lack of standardisation, inadequate information availability and poor work schedules create situations in which individuals are more likely to make mistakes. One of the biggest problems is in measuring errors. Voluntary self-reporting gives low rates, while the use of chart reviews and computer screening provides much higher rates. 10.00 Process design failures result from the failure to analyse the purposes of a system and how they can best be achieved, relying on the ways things were, perhaps. This is a big effect, may be the cause of about half of all errors.