ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the term clinical safety to indicate an important distinction between the safety of patients and the safety of personnel or the environment in which they work. It focuses on some special risks to patients associated with equipment used in diagnosis and treatment and how those risks are potentially minimized, monitored, assessed, and corrected. Safety personnel are not likely to be confident about strictly clinical safety issues unless they are directly affected by safety features falling within their own realm of competence. Government regulations run far behind most ward practice and are much less stringent for machines than for drugs. Machines placed permanently in the body call for both machine safety and the patient's physical safety. The complexity of organization for therapeutic action derives not only from the problematic character of many trajectories but from the number and range of tasks involved in the therapeutic action, plus the organization of tasks involved in controlling the illness course.
