New focus on averting errors: hospital culture.

The National Quality Forum, a governmentadvisory body that sets voluntary safety standards for hospitals, has developed a Care of the Caregiver standard, calling on hospitals to treat traumatized staffers involved in errors as patients requiring care, then involving them in the investigation of what went wrong if their behavior was not found to be reckless or intentional. Just Culture, a model developed by engineer David Marx, stresses finding a middle ground between a blame-free culture, which attributes all errors to system failure and says no individual is held accountable, and overly punitive culture, where individuals are blamed for all mistakes.