Hacker News Reader

Comment by TaupeRanger | Hacker News Reader

Unless the mistakes led to death that wouldn't have otherwise occurred in a similar timeframe, the anecdotes wouldn't even be relevant.

View on HN

Based off the fact that mistakes that lead to death are so high... If we had statistics on errors that didn't lead to death, the results would be an astronomically larger illustration of incompetence then Just mistakes that lead to death.

Medical mistake literally killed my family member by giving her an IV with the wrong drug. She was dead withing 20 minutes.

That’s an appalling tragedy, but nobody here is saying deaths from medical mistakes don’t happen.

Mistakes don't sort neatly by causes into fatal and non-fatal. Some of almost any kind are fatal. Anything that prevented fatal mistakes would eliminate most others.

I’m not in the medical industry, and I’m a Brit and don’t know what the estimated stats are here. But the way I think about this is that medicine must be at least as complex and side effects are at a minimum as hard to anticipate as software development.

Bugs are a fact of life in development, nobody thinks software having any bugs at all is normal or that bugs are an irrefutable indicator of incompetence. That’s because anyone with any knowledge of Tyne subject has developed software and spent a huge part of that time fixing their own bugs.

The way you deal with that is through testing, defensive coding, making software maintainable, etc. You minimise the impact bugs have and try to ensure mistakes are recoverable. You also avoid counterproductive measures like punishing bug reporting, because that will just lead to cover ups and sweeping the problems under the rug.

The last thing we want to do is punish the reporting of medical errors. So yes I absolutely agree, and the way to do that is to build an honest and healthy culture around reporting of medical mistakes.

We already know the most effective way to reduce, and often eliminate, medical mistakes: rigorously applied checklists. They are still used only here and there, years after this was well demonstrated. It is well past time to treat not rigorously following checklists as negligent malpractice.

Medicine depends overwhelmingly more on manually applied procedures that would be automated, in a computer, as patients and staff manifestly are not. So, the same mistakes are repeated again and again. A software fix would correspond to changing a checklist.

Still, it would be no bad thing to use checklists for manual processes in software development, but I have never heard of any.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com