Author: Suzette Woodward

Automaticity is the ability for us to do things without thinking – going on to automatic pilot if you will. It allows us to automatically do things that are habits, rituals and norms. In my view this has a clear link to how we want to look at safety through the safety II lens or […]

I came across this video of the wonderful Tim Minchin – a great story teller – who described confirmative bias in a really great way for me [side note is this calling out my own confirmative bias?]. You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoEezZD71sc Confirmative bias is a conundrum for those of us who work in […]

In the last few years, the way we talk about patient safety has started to shift. Thanks to our ability to observe, study, evolve, adapt and learn, we have gained enough information and knowledge to begin addressing the safety of patient care and the working conditions within healthcare. We have gained an understanding of what […]

In Patient Safety Now I assert that the future of patient safety requires us to do 3 things Lets look at the first one. Look at safety differently. Professor James Reason famously said over twenty years ago, ‘we cannot change the human condition, but we can change the conditions under which humans work’ These conditions […]

“The easy understandable and completely wrong answer to an incident is to blame those who made the mistake. The correct response is to redesign systems, so that errors are acknowledged, detected, intercepted and mitigated.” This quote could have been written today, but was in fact written in the British Medical Journal published on the 18 […]

Just in case you have been wondering why I have not posted for a while. I am writing my third book. So I am a little distracted! I have also been doing lots of lovely presentations, workshops and masterclasses on safety I and safety II, just culture and psychological safety. Learning tons. So over the […]

This is a blog which is part of a series of blogs linked to my second book which can be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Implementing-Patient-Safety-Addressing-Conditions/dp/0815376863 Work-as-done The things that happen frequently in the daily activities of every day clinical work is coined by those that study human factors as work-as-done.  In healthcare people adapt and adjust their actions […]

This is another blog in the series linked to my second book which can be found here: Part two focuses on the theories and concepts described in part one and explores how we can turn these into practice i.e. how we can practically use them to improve the safety of patient care.  It explores the methods […]

This is a blog which is part of a series of blogs linked to my second book which can be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Implementing-Patient-Safety-Addressing-Conditions/dp/0815376863 Complexity science has evolved in part from systems theory and aims to help us understand what constitutes the complex system (and complex adaptive system) and to identify the common characteristics.  Complexity science can […]