Prof.
S. Dekker
You can WATCH THE LECTURE via the link at the bottom of this pageProf. Sidney Dekker is Professor of Human Factors and System Safety at Lund University, Sweden and Director of Research at the Leonardo Da Vinci Center for Complexity and Systems Thinking. He gained his Ph.D. in Cognitive Systems Engineering from The Ohio State University, USA and has worked in Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and England.
He has been a Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and Visiting Academic in the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, Monash University in Melbourne. He is scientific advisor on healthcare system safety to the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority and Professor of Community Health Science at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Manitoba, in Canada. His research interests include system safety, human error, reactions to failure, and organizational resilience.
His recent books include “Ten Questions About Human Error: A New View of Human Factors and System Safety” (2005), “The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error” (2006), and “Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability” (2007). He also flies the Boeing 737NG part time as airline pilot. He is member of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The OSU Foundation in the United States awards a yearly Sidney Dekker Critical Thinking Award.
Title: Learning from medical error, dealing with the hindsight bias
Short summary: Medical error has been the subject of much public debate in recent times, and the past decades have seen a steep increase in the frequency and size of claims against doctors and other medical personnel, as well as a heightened concern among lawmakers, insurers and regulators. The problem with a judgment of "error" (or, worse, "negligence") is the constructed and negotiated nature of both concepts, which are subject to what are known as the outcome bias and hindsight bias. The hindsight bias is one of the most well-researched biases in psychology and relates to the overestimation of probability of an adverse event, as well as the oversimplified causality of that event, perceived by a retrospective outsider. The outcome bias is a largely preconscious cognitive effect produced by the observer's knowledge of the outcome, which distorts the assessment of decisions leading up to that outcome. In this talk, Prof. Dekker will run through some of the relevant legal, medical, psychological and sociological literature on the operation of these pervasive and universal biases in judgments of medical "error" and "negligence" and seek ways to address the problem.