ABSTRACT
Addressing medical errors in the National Health Service (NHS) is an area where there have long been concerns raised as to the impact of both internal organisation factors and also external factors upon attempts to effectively identify and resolve such issues. Over many years it has been claimed that the investigation of medical errors and adverse incidents in the NHS has been fundamentally inhibited by the hostile environment which existed. This chapter focuses on the question of investigating matters where things have gone wrong in relation to patient safety and specifically in the context of two recent initiatives which can be seen potentially playing an important role in this area in the future. Air accidents and NHS incidents are two very different factual scenarios and, while comparators may indeed be useful, transplanting concepts across such diverse areas should be approached with extreme caution.
