ABSTRACT
Studying the causes of error in medicine can be challenging. Ideally, one might want to conduct research in the real clinical environment. However, the incidence of serious events is (thankfully) low, so the yield on such direct clinical observations might be small (tracking less-serious, or nearevents might provide a larger yield). The clinical realm also presents many
confounding variables that make attribution of errors to specific factors uncertain (controlled experiments with well-controlled variables are not typically possible). Further, research in clinical areas is necessarily limited because one needs to be sure that the study itself does not affect worker performance and patient care.
