This work presents an alternative approach to presuming that incidents with diverse outcomes of serious injury or death are the result of an error committed solely by the health care provider.

This edited collection of articles addresses aspects of medical care in which human error is associated with unanticipated adverse outcomes. For the purposes of this book, human error encompasses mismanagement of medical care due to:
* inadequacies or ambiguity in the design of a medical device or institutional setting for the delivery of medical care;
* inappropriate responses to antagonistic environmental conditions such as crowding and excessive clutter in institutional settings, extremes in weather, or lack of power and water in a home or field setting;
* cognitive errors...