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Creating a "no blame" culture: have we got the balance right?

Correspondence to:
Associate Professor M Walton
Faculty of Medicine, University of Sydney, Sydney 2006, Australia; mwalton@dme.med.usyd.edu.au

Keywords: patient safety; medical error; professional responsibility

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

How the media reports patient harm associated with adverse events continues to cause public concern and disturb health professionals. The need for health professionals to communicate more effectively with the public about medical errors has been identified,^1,2 but to date there is little evidence of this happening. Tensions surrounding professional responsibility and accountability (as opposed to institutional accountability) and the quality and safety "no blame" approach within the health system prevent health professionals communicating clearly with the public. How can we give a clear message to the public when we do not have a clear understanding of these issues ourselves?

The current focus on improving care by redesigning systems, tasks and workforce³ necessarily emphasises the multiple factors underpinning errors, relies on reporting systems for capturing errors, and advocates a "blame free" environment so that staff will report their mistakes or near misses. This approach examines system factors . . . [Full text of this article]

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