How Might We Think About Safety? Inviting Deeper Reasoning Through Elaborative Inquiry

Frameworks in which we think and facilitate learning experiences about safe operations in healthcare are essential for planning for and practicing safety management. The community of practitioners who study safe operations has for some time described the danger of preponderantly focusing on information from safety reporting systems. Yet in practice there is a tendency towards this very preoccupation. Furthermore, we have not experienced learning environments designed to challenge this presupposition or encourage learners to critically reflect on the effect that institutionalized thinking may have on work-as-done in patient safety management. This paper describes a learning experience designed to interactively and incrementally invite collective discussion into diverse conceptualizations of safety. We review limitations and the subsequent influence of these conceptualizations of safety on systems design. The success of these conversations will be defined by how future generations think about and piece together this puzzle we call safety.