Investigating aviation errors and IVF mistakes - a fair comparison?

Minister of Health Khaw Boon Wan made an interesting reference to the investigation of aviation errors while commenting or the recent IVF mistake which occurred at the Thomson Medical Centre.

He said: "Like the health sector, the aviation sector used to approach safety and errors through a largely fault-finding approach. When a plane crashed or hit a problem, the first question was to nail down the culprit: who was responsible, was the pilot at fault, was the engineer negligent etc? This used to be their approach a decade or two ago.

But they have since moved away from that approach. Instead, they took a system approach. Each time an adverse event occurs, they will conduct an objective and thorough investigation, not to witch hunt, but to identify the causes, especially if there are systemic flaws. Because they moved away from fault-finding, everyone was open in their comments, resulting in a speedy and accurate assessment of the true situation. Under the previous approach, the tendency was to protect one’s interest, resulting sometimes in cover-ups and the truth became elusive."

It's a very enlightened approach, and one to be applauded, although at some point in time there needs to be some accountability and someone has to take responsibility for not putting in place adequate measures to prevent errors. The MOM comes in hard for employers who put their workers in jeopardy by being negligent in not ensuring adequate workplace safety. In our research laboratories, the principle investigator faces a possible jailable outcome should lab safety measures be violated, or he has been negligent. Should not we expect the same rigour when medical professionals are negligent in situations such as this?

But I digress. The real purpose of this post is to explore the appropriateness or lack of, in the comparison with the investigation of aviation errors.

Avoidance of fault finding and cover-ups are two faces of the same coin. Often breakdowns in the integrity of a system/process extends beyond the party holding the smoking gun. If an error occurs in the regulatory functions, this would be less likely to be flagged out if the investigating team comes from the regulators themselves. In the investigation of aviation errors, to avoid this conflict of interests, an independent body forms the investigating team. Only thus, can the true extent of errors be discovered. If the investigating team is formed by the regulator, it is more than likely that a "fault" will be found only in the party in possession of the smoking gun.

In this instance of the IVF error, the investigating team is the Ministry of Health team. Yet it is the Ministry of Health which audits and regulates this industry. How can the Ministry then identify weaknesses in its own audit/regulatory systems covering the IVF facilities which allowed high likelihood of errors such as this to be committed? This is uncertain.

Should we not require some sort of pre-implantation diagnosis of paternity to be documented as validation of the integrity of the process before the embryo is implanted? Doing so will at least ensure that at the very least, there are no costly mistakes beyond the irreversible step of implantation.

Perhaps the Ministry of Health could consider releasing the last audit findings of Thomson Medical Centre so that the public can gauge if the audit was done with the stringency we expect, and/or the facility failed to act of recommendations.

As the Minister pointed out, this should not be to find fault but to enable everyone to correct all the deficiencies of the system. Following which, we can move on.