Making 'safety' the focus of investigations into adverse events in health care.

This paper seeks to provide an overview for applying lessons learned in aviation safety investigation to safety investigation in the healthcare industry. There are well established regulations and procedures in aviation that make safety the end product of any accident investigation. Furthermore, standards of practice in aviation are well documented and are part of the legal code. This is currently not the case in healthcare. While healthcare has made admirable strides in improving patient safety, we maintain that concepts such as regulation, independence of investigation, standards of practice, and investigator competency to name a few, are important to move healthcare safety to the next level.