{"id":64590,"date":"2022-04-14T22:19:03","date_gmt":"2022-04-15T02:19:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=64590"},"modified":"2026-01-21T16:15:27","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T20:15:27","slug":"healthcare-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/healthcare-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Healthcare Culture: Should Failure Be Acknowledged?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Is healthcare culture failure-averse? When mistakes and failures occur, should they be acknowledged and treated as learning opportunities? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Black Box Thinking<\/em>, the author talks about how certain industries progress from failures. For example, the airline industries carefully track and learn from their mistakes while our healthcare culture has an aversion to failure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keep reading to learn why failure aversion in healthcare culture stunts growth in the healthcare system. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Case Study: Failure Aversion in the Health Care System<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Syed argues that in the healthcare culture, hospitals have numerous opportunities to learn from failure<\/a> but often disregard them. This is because they operate according to top-down systems that go unquestioned, and healthcare cultures stigmatize failure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Problem #1: Healthcare Cultures Avoid Acknowledging Mistakes <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals train for years, so they expect perfection from themselves and their peers. Mistakes carry a strong stigma\u2014if you mess up as a surgeon or nurse, you\u2019ll be looked down upon\u2014and the more senior your role, the stronger the blame.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because of this, Syed argues, many health care workers fear reporting mistakes. Reporting their own errors leads to consequences, and reporting their superiors might provoke retaliation. As we explained above, cognitive dissonance compounds the problem: A doctor can unwittingly suppress his memory of a failure, justify the mistakes, or outright deny that it happened. By doing so, he preserves his reputation at the expense of continued patient harm. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Shortform note: In a January 2022 article<\/a>, emergency room nurse Sally Ersun details her gut-wrenching last day on the job, highlighting the systemic issues Syed refers to. Understaffed and overburdened, her department had too few supplies and could not provide blood for a dying man; another patient was left unattended and fell and hit her head\u2014and there was no time to report the incident. Ersun explains that she\u2019s been \u201cthreatened\u201d by superiors, and ultimately quit due to physical and emotional exhaustion. A nurse for 10 years, she argues that health care\u2019s for-profit model \u201cprioritizes finances over lives,\u201d which stoutly corroborates Syed\u2019s analysis of health care.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Problem #2: Healthcare Systems Don\u2019t Analyze Failures <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Many hospitals also lack systems for reporting, investigating, and improving upon errors. Syed cites a report showing that fewer than 20 US states require error reporting<\/a> mechanisms in hospitals. Of those 20, few consistently investigate errors and enforce changes. Another study found that of 273 hospitalizations, hospitals \u201cmissed or ignored\u201d 93% of preventable errors<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In healthcare culture, investigating errors simply isn\u2019t the convention. Because of this, numerous mistakes\u2014including hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths annually\u2014go unexamined. Many deaths from surgery, medication error, and neglect are written off as \u201cinevitable\u201d or \u201cone-off\u201d tragedies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Shortform note: One key to effective investigations is to work with an independent investigator. In 2016, a National Health Service investigation<\/a> demonstrated the need for this, showing that hospitals consistently treated family members of the deceased with little courtesy and often ignored or blocked their requests for information. The Care Quality Commission (CQC), a care watchdog based in England, is attempting to establish an independent review process to enforce accountability. Their first goal is to secure better treatment for the families, which the CQC determined hospital workers view as \u201cantagonistic.\u201d) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since they don\u2019t learn from their mistakes, hospitals also lack \u201cinstitutional memory,\u201d a shared compendium of lessons learned.<\/strong> Without this, the few lessons learned take years, even decades, to percolate through the broader health care system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The infrequency of autopsies exemplifies the problem, according to Syed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n