

They suspect cost is the driving force










Source: Yahoo News

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RE: ???
By nathan v on 12/31/2012 6:58:36 PM , Rating: 2
In medicine, we used to deal with safety by assigning responsibility, punishing transgression, and encouraging people to be careful. What we found was that that didn't work very well. We had a great product that was saving lives, but it was also taking lives, and telling people to be more careful didn't impact the frequency with which it did so.

What ended up working? (Well, to the extent that it works, because we still take lives.) Redundancy. Rather than assigning responsibility to individuals or small groups, we asked larger groups to take responsibility for patient safety. What we found is that when more people took responsibility, people still made errors, but those errors didn't lead to bad outcomes like death, because they were caught before they had a chance to.

That's exactly what's going on. No, it wasn't the responsibility of auto-makers to help prevent these kind of deaths. But it is now.

Obviously, any changes like this have to be considered in detail. It's not impossible for redundancy to paradoxically reduce safety. It's not impossible for the cost to outweigh the benefit. But in general, this change in paradigm from "assign responsibility" to "improve outcomes" is responsible for much of what we take for granted in our sweet, modern lives.

