Medical applications of industrial safety science

• safety management
• patient safety

The medical community is becoming more open to learning safety lessons from other domains, but it should remain aware of the sometimes differing tasks and contexts. These same differences could also challenge experienced safety researchers to cross the boundary from industry and transportation into health care in order to contribute to the understanding, measurement, and enhancement of “patient safety”.

Over the last few decades safety science has developed rapidly thanks to the (frequently disaster related) “challenges” in the areas of industry (chemical and nuclear) and transportation (civil aviation) where failures could simply not be tolerated any longer by the public and government. These domains have risked their “licence to operate” on several occasions and concluded that their control of processes had to change at the system level. This sense of urgency is not yet widespread in the medical profession nor among patients. So how can the brave storm troopers from a limited number of medical sectors get the most out of the available experiences? This editorial attempts to summarise the main lessons available to healthcare workers.