The New View of Safety

It’s been less than a month since the first Global Safety Innovation Summit landed at the idyllic surf-side town of Wollongong, New South Wales.

The Summit was incredibly well-attended and full of thought provoking theory and practice. It also felt like a watershed moment, at least to me. No longer are contemporary ideas in safety relegated to the fringe. The ‘new view’ is establishing itself as useful, usable and effective in tackling messy, thorny safety challenges in ways that make sense to workers, leaders and safety people alike.

What does this mean for us in healthcare? If industries with far better safety records are methodically pivoting to news ways of looking at safety, shouldn’t we pay more attention too?

With this first issue of The Human Stream, we begin a short series on the New View: focusing on key ideas and implications for how we create a safer health system.

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What is the ‘New View’ of Safety?

The ‘new view of safety’ isn't one singular idea, nor is it a static one. Instead, it’s a way of referring to a collection of distinct emerging approaches that move safety beyond traditional thinking. At the heart of the new view are three broad shifts: