ABSTRACT
This chapter has a lot to say about patient safety. I make no apology for this. While few of us have flown a passenger aircraft or operated a nuclear power or chemical process plant, most of us have been patients – many in acute care hospitals. Healthcare issues affect all of us and our close families. Patient safety concerns touch everyone. And the basic issues present in complex sociotechnical systems recur in healthcare organizations, often with some nasty variants. This domain has been my primary interest for the past dozen years or so.
