Well, that's not difficult to imagine: Let's have another round of checking before any medicine is dispensed to patients. It sounds reasonable - after all, no one is in favor of medication error. Therefore, when an incident happens, we should do everything we can to make sure it won't happen again.
But, hold on. We should not.
The reason is simple. It is because time and all other resources are finite, every sensible thing we do is another sensible thing we don't. More often than not, using the time to double check a prescription would mean a corresponding delay in our patients' receiving the treatment. It is, in fact, a well known psychological loophole that when human beings make decisions, we focus on what we are getting and forget about the opportunistic cost that we are giving up.
And the theory is not new. Three hundred years ago, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat derived mathematically the optimal strategy for betting on games of chance. In short, the best choice about harm prevention is the product of two estimates: How likely the harmful event is, and how much harm it will cause.
Go read Daniel Gilbert. Buried by bad decisions. Nature 2011; 474: 275-277.
No comments:
Post a Comment