The nature and scope of safety management in the NHS comparison with NASA and aviation

Safety critical industries are those that may cause harm to the environment, public or personnel (Reiman & Oedewald, 2008) and they are required to manage and monitor their own safety operations. Healthcare is regarded as such an industry. Public enquiries into serious healthcare failures in the 1990’s resulted in recommendations to increase safety operations, one of them being to incorporate safety management methods used by other safety critical industries, namely aviation. At that time safety critical industries followed a ‘find and fix’ method of safety management using tools like incident reporting. Consequently healthcare research focused on developing incident reporting, as well as team learning and checklists (Sendlhofer, & Kamolz, 2015). In the ensuing 20 years, safety critical industries incorporated the latest research into the systems approach when developing their safety management systems (SMS), whilst the NHS focused its research on improving patient safety through gaining greater clinical evidence and improving incident reporting.