Doctor and Patient - Holding Doctors Accountable for Medical Errors - NYTimes.com

Editorial Comment: The emphasis of this article seems to place a rather large burden on physicians which is not totally warranted.

Doctor and Patient - Holding Doctors Accountable for Medical Errors - NYTimes.com

Q. What is a major patient safety area that still needs to be addressed?
A. Ten years ago, we approached patient safety as a series of system flaws; we believed that most errors were committed by good competent people doing something no more complicated than forgetting a cellphone. But in the last few years some of us in the patient safety field have begun to feel uneasy about that approach. When there are reasonably safe standards available, what do you do when people simply don’t adhere to them? At some point, it’s no longer a “systems problem.”