ABSTRACT
Medical errors occur even when health-care professionals have done everything in their power to prevent them from happening. Unfortunately, for various reasons, many professionals are reluctant to report these errors. This chapter problematizes such reluctance by suggesting that medical errors could alternatively be used as a collaborative learning tool. This is because there is far too much literature, and far too many potential diagnostic tests, for any one health-care professional to fully comprehend on their own. This creates a lacuna in which errors are liable to occur. In recognizing this problem of the unknown, this chapter provides the argument that health-care professionals can use errors to learn with each other. Such an attitude can have the additional benefit of increasing the health-care professional’s capacity for epistemic humility—namely, the realization that they do not know everything, and their ability to work within this reality.
