Medical error is third biggest cause of death in the US, experts say

Re:Medical error is third biggest cause of death in the US, ... by MertsA on Thursday May 05, 2016 @05:36AM (#11634817)

Just because the pilot is identified as the cause does not mean that anyone is blaming the pilot for being negligent. If a pilot sneezed while landing he's still the cause but that certainly doesn't make him negligent just because he made a mistake. Aviation (and computer science for that matter) is built around mitigating faults and mistakes at every level, that's the biggest part of why air travel is so safe is that it's designed around failure being acceptable. There are contingencies for anything that can foreseeably go wrong because in reality nothing is perfect, and certainly not the pilots.

We need to be treating doctors how we treat pilots.

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Re:Medical error is third biggest cause of death in the US, ... by greedo on Thursday May 05, 2016 @11:38AM (#11637043)

I think that the acceptance of failure in certain domains is a problem of system design. Why shouldn't doctor, pilots, ship's captains, train conductors etc be held accountable (blamed) for mistakes? I don't agree with your statement that air travel is designed around the acceptance of failure meaning that pilots aren't culpable for their mistakes. Watch a NTSB hearing into a pilots failures, and there's plenty of blame assigned when appropriate. Doctors and other medical professionals should be similarly scrutinized and ostracized when they perform poorly.

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