Safety: Worth A Fortune

Have you noticed that our culture has become increasingly reactionary? I mean, there is an entire genre on YouTube for Reaction Videos. People sit and watch other people react to videos, news reels, and opening boxes, for example, and they are incredibly popular. In life, there seem to be a lot of people sitting and waiting for things to happen just so they can react to it. They fall into Doom Scrolling as they search for something to react to, and I’m left wondering where all the proactive people are hiding.

One place where a reactive culture does not work is in patient safety. If the safety culture of an organization is reactionary, then you’re always putting out fires — literally! — and the same mistakes happen over and over again. However, the approach in Patient Safety acknowledges that human lives, and the processes that support them, are fragile. Our patient’s lives are precious, and if we were blind to our potential for error, we would be even more vulnerable.

That’s why patient safety often approaches basic clinical practices with a Murphy’s Law mentality. If everything that can go wrong does go wrong, how can the healthcare team prevent the worst outcomes, identify problems quickly, and recover promptly? In fact, patient safety professionals hope to be bored by their case reviews, but they also have the imagination to foresee potential problems and identify near misses.

What does imagination have to do with patient safety exactly?

Some of the tools used by the Ocean’s team were confusion, unplanned changes, faulty equipment, emotionally charged incidents, fear, and people arguing. Have you ever been to a healthcare organization that lacked confusion, unplanned changes, faulty equipment, emotionally charged incidents, fear, and people arguing? It’s like a guide to an average day at work! Yet, each factor can cause employees to become reactionary rather than proactive. 

In the movie, two of the thieves pose as security guards and pretend their badge doesn’t work to let them into the secure area. They start yelling, and the guard at the door gets uncomfortable and lets them in even though it’s against protocol. We all want to solve problems quickly and quietly. We don’t have a plan for faulty badges in a high-stakes environment. We aren’t ready to manage people yelling in the lobby, but we need them to calm down fast. So we react, and the vault is breached.

Danny Ocean predicted human behavior. We need to recognize all of the normal responses that are hazardous and work them backwards like it’s worth a million dollars to keep it from happening. 

Because in many cases, it really is.