Automaticity is the term given by psychologists to the skilled action that people develop through repeatedly practising the same activity, for example driving a car. Usually, automaticity is discussed in terms of the benefits it brings to people, such as the reduction in the degree of conscious attention a person needs to pay to such skilled activities. However, there is evidence to suggest that substantial costs may also be associated with such learned behaviour. Managing patient safety is a difficult task and one of the ways in which health-care professionals seek to accomplish it is through the use of verbal challenge-response protocols. However, it is argued in this paper that it is possible for the negative effects of automaticity to involuntarily capture those using such verbal checklist techniques and cause them to erroneously believe that the treatment that they are about to administer to a patient is safe when it is not. This phenomenon does not, however, seem to have been recognized by the health-care community nationally or internationally. We conclude that patient safety could be significantly improved worldwide if the organizational arrangements which appear to induce involuntary automaticity were to be robustly addressed by the management of all health-care organizations.
In order to compare the efficacy and tolerance of two drug formulations of ibuprofen, conventional tablets 600 mg QID (CI) and sustained-release tablets 1200 mg BID (SRI), a total of 147 patients in 7 centres in Denmark with nontraumatic shoulder pain were included in a double-blind dummy study. Initially all patients received a local injection of corticosteroid and local anaesthetic, and were randomly allocated either drug (CI or SRI) for a period of 3 weeks. Complete relief was recorded from significantly more of the patients in the CI group (21%) than in the SRI group (7%) while a similar number of patients improved viz., 67% of the SRI treated group and 77% of the CI treated group. Based on doctor's assessment improvement in the two groups was equal. 44% of the patients recorded side effects, the number and pattern being the same in the two groups. No serious side effects were recorded. It is concluded that the two treatment regimens can be rated as clinically equivalent.
One of the most disturbing features of man‐made disasters is that
often the cause has been known beforehand but little or nothing has been
done to prevent the occurrence or often re‐occurrence. Examines the
failure to implement the lessons from previous experience.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.