Reading List

This list of publications, primarily books, provides a background for those wishing to become informed about the problems of medical error, error theory, and basic environmental psychology. There are  also many excellent articles and papers which deal with those subjects and closely related topics.

The Design of Everyday Things – Donald Norman, Basic Books, 1988. This book is a “seminal work” on the failures of modern architectural and industrial design. It has excellent sections on memory, errors, and cognitive processes.

 

Baptist Health Care Journey to Excellence – Al Stubblefield, John Wiley, Hoboken, 2003. Tells how Baptist came from the brink of extinction to winning the Malcolm Baldridge National Service Quality Award, only one of two or three HC organizations to do so.

 

The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell. First of two books by Gladwell, both on Best Seller Lists. Talks about how little things make big differences and “epidemics.”

 

Blink – Malcolm Gladwell. Discusses how our minds process information including how the minds of experts work and how ordinary people sometimes make terrible mistakes.

 

Human Error – James Reason, Cambridge University Press, 1990. Scientific, deep, but a major work.  Reason “invented” the “Swiss Cheese” model.

 

The House of God – Samuel Shem. “True fiction” about the year of residency of a budding physician. Delves into the mind of the doc.

 

To Err is Human, Building a Safer Health System – Institute of Medicine. This book and earlier articles by Lucian Leape, MD of Harvard Med School, started the creation of a national focus on the patient safety problem.

 

Crossing the Quality Chasm, A New Health System for the 21st Century – Institute of Medicine, sequel to To Err is Human

 

The Hospital: A Social and Architectural History – John D. Thompson and Grace Goldin. Out of print, but may be available

 

The Gold Standard – Stefan Timmermans and Marc Berg, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2003. Development of guidelines and standards in medicine traced from mid 19th C to present. Great discussion of “professions” and “professionalism.”

 

Normal Accidents – Charles Perrow, Princeton University Press 1999, first published by Basic Books in 1984. Perrow uses an analysis of well known accidents to draw conclusions about the key factors in accident causation and development.

 

 

 

 

 

The “Swiss Cheese” model, after Reason