Despite modern equipment, continuing research and excellent training facilities our western health care system has a serious safety problem. It is estimated that out of all hospital admissions 2.9% to 16.6% suffer unintentional harm and in the USA alone up to 100,000 people may die as a result of medical errors [1]. Data from the Netherlands (2004) seem to support this with an annual number of 30.000 patients suffering preventable harm including approximately 1.735 avoidable deaths [2]. The financial cost of avoidable adverse events was estimated to be 1% of the hospital total budget [3].
These alarming reports resulted internationally in increased pressure to improve patient safety. In line with the current safety paradigm that limiting human variability in otherwise safe systems will lead to safer care [4], this resulted in more stringent procedural guidelines. Checklists, time-outs and safety management systems were subsequently implemented [5]. Unfortunately, current efforts have not eliminated human error [2] and as expected matters are worse in the ICU environment [6, 7, 8]. Patients in the ICU frequently suffer from severe, multiple-system disorders that require more testing, monitoring, invasive treatment and intravenous medications than in any other hospital department [9]. Errors in this setting have a greater impact due to the increased vulnerability of the patient. The sheer number of available data essential to make a single decision is daunting. Furthermore, ‘rogue’ data (irrelevant but abnormal e.g. a high glucose value) unrelated to the true problem can cause a change or loss in focus on the ‘real’ problem. This puts great pressure on multidisciplinary planning and decision making and combined with the time-critical aspects of the ICU environment increases patient risk.
Identifying the key factors in safe critical care is a challenging task. Human factors appear to play an important role [10]. Less often organizational and technical factors are involved. This is consistent with publications from other critical industries [11].