Hospital safety and complexity

Hospitals are complex systems.1 Efforts to improve hospital safety have met with only limited success.2 Application of the science of complex systems and networks may help.3 4 Retrospective investigation of major adverse events commonly shows pre-existing malfunction. Pattern dynamics3 4 is the prospective evaluation of relevant processes enabling threshold …

[1]  Peter J Pronovost,et al.  Is quality of care improving in the UK? , 2011, BMJ : British Medical Journal.

[2]  P. Plsek,et al.  The challenge of complexity in health care , 2001, BMJ : British Medical Journal.

[3]  B. Bell,et al.  Is the National Health Service at the Edge of Chaos? , 2001, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

[4]  E. Ostrom.  A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems , 2009, Science.