Attitudes to Error and Patient Safety

The vast majority of patients clearly benefit from modern health care. However, the rate of injury and death inadvertently caused by medical treatment remains too high, and exacts enormous human and financial costs. Organisational change is not solely a technological issue however, and the attitudes of clinicians are critical to the successful improvement of safety and the effective re‐design of procedures and equipment. We purposively surveyed a group of clinicians for whom treatment‐caused harm is of particular concern in order to better understand some of the difficulties involved in technological change and the potential attitudinal barriers to safety improvement.