There are two viewpoints on medical errors: one that focuses on the person, the other that focuses on the system. James Reason taught us to reject the person viewpoint, which focuses on the errors and violations of individual people.1 The focus on the person leads us to direct remedial efforts at people on the front line of patient care. It also justifies blaming the individual who errs. Instead, Reason helped us don system lenses and pull back to accommodate a system viewpoint that traces causal factors back to the system as a whole. This approach persuades us to direct remedial effort at situations and organisations. The system viewpoint exposes individual blame as myopic and unjust, and unlikely to lead to improvements in safety. As part of the system, individual people make mistakes, and share responsibility for failures and patient harm. But it is not all their fault when things go wrong. Institutions today should be aware that humans will err and create failsafes to defend against this. As Reason wrote, ‘we cannot change the human condition, but we can change the conditions under which humans work.’

Despite this understanding, the greatest trauma for individual clinicians is making an error that harms a patient.2 Clinicians suffer emotional trauma after adverse events, with a cascade of anxiety, sadness, guilt, anger and frustration.3 They worry about the patient, about damage to their own reputation and potential punishment. Importantly, they feel like it is all their fault, like they have failed, that they are incompetent. They feel isolated and pinned …