News

Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite spoke at the International Forum on Quality & Safety in Healthcare virtual conference in the ‘Reliability and Resilience. Moving from Safety I to Safety II’ session on Wednesday 4 November. The session was opened by Dr Axel Ros, Chief Medical Officer in Region Jönköping County in Sweden. Dr Ros explained the difference between the concepts of Safety I, which focuses on the causes of accidents and what can be learned when things go wrong, and Safety II, which is what can be learned when things go as planned.

Professor Braithwaite then spoke about resilience in healthcare. He began his talk by explaining the 60:30:10 challenge. That is that 60% of healthcare is provided within guidelines, 30% is of little to no value to the patient and 10% is harm. Most of the attention traditionally focuses on the things that go wrong (Safety I). However, he flipped the perspective on these numbers to say that in 90% of the cases, care actually is provided as expected (Safety II). He discussed the importance of understanding the contribution of resilience within a system to patient safety and ways to foster resilience within healthcare systems.

Professor Peter Dieckmann, Senior Scientist at the Copenhagen Academy for Medical Education and Simulation, Capital Region of Denmark, presented next on learning from success in mundane situations. He discussed the importance of studying the small and ongoing adjustments made in healthcare systems to improve care as well as the major changes that occur.

The session concluded with a discussion with Professor Siri Wiig, from the Faulty of Health Sciences, University of Stavanger, Norway.

A recording of the full session is available online now: https://player.vimeo.com/video/473577174.