Disruptive Proactivity

One of the things I didn’t put enough time into last year was the safety of medical devices.

Harold Thimbleby’s talk (audio) at the 2014 Security and Human Behaviour conference covered the topic of the “second victim”. The first victim being the patient who was harmed; the second victim (usually) being the nurse who used a badly designed device, and was honest about what happened.

In one of Harold’s presentations, there’s a photo of two “regulatory” “identical” devices, which have entirely different interfaces: this is a design failure, that causes repeated human mistakes, that kills people.

There is little evidence available on the scope of the problem in practice, so I made a selection of Freedom of Information requests to the hospitals in East Anglia, with a view to seeing if there were any vague patterns that could be distinguished to look at greater sources of concern.

Over christmas, I got chance to finally review most of the data in the spreadsheet, but ran out of time to actually do anything with it. So here it is, in case you get chance to have a look before I come back to it (which wont be for several months at least).

There’s certainly something interesting in this topic, the question that will highlight it remains unresolved.