Learning from errors for continuously improving patient safety

To err is human, however, learning from errors is the first step toward understanding the reasons why those adverse events (AEs) occurred. Therefore, instead of affixing punishment or blame to the employees, most of the hospitals held a positive attitude and started on digging out root causes of the medical errors since 1990s. Since then, the methodology of safety-based root cause analysis (RCA) has been developed and widely applied in quality management in the hospitals. RCA is now popular and promising used as an error analysis tool in health care industry, yet the effectiveness and outcomes of RCAs are still needed to do more research as well as observation. For this reason, we highlight the topic of improving the effectiveness of RCA and identifying the features of AEs in this issue of IJQHC.