Experts’ Corner

Design is a key activity in ensuring the on-going safety of hazardous engineering infrastructure. Construction flaws and operational errors have been highlighted as causal factors in many disasters but getting the design right in the first place is also fundamental for avoiding accidents as we see across multiple domains including built environment (e.g. Grenfell Tower), aviation (e.g. Boeing 737 MAX), space exploration (e.g. Challenger) and nuclear (e.g. Chernobyl).

Awareness of medical harm and efforts to reduce it are as old as medicine itself, dating back to Hippocrates classic dictum to ‘abstain from harming or wronging any man.’  Modern healthcare brings us incredible benefits and transforms many lives. However, medicine has always been an inherently risky enterprise; the hopes of benefit and cure always linked to the possibility of harm.