One day it struck me that the world would be a very different place if environmental crimes were treated in the same way as murders. So, why aren’t they? And should they be?
At the moment such crimes can, mistakenly, feel distant and abstract. If someone came into your flat and set fire to your furniture, stole your valuables, killed your pet, added poison to your water … what would you do? You’d be terrified. You’d go to the police. You might want revenge. You’d certainly want justice. It would be entirely obvious to you that a crime had been committed.
I am reminded of hospital acquired infections being treated like car crashes or plane crashes.
Car crashes kill massive numbers of people each year, just under 5 per 100,000 people per year here in Australia. That is way down and we are quite low globally, with the EU overall around 9 and 14 for the USA. We have taken fairly agressive steps to curb road deaths and made real progress, but a certain number of deaths is accepted as necessary. A crash is investigated for fault attribution and insurance but not for preventing a repeat.
Plane crashes are totally different. If something caused a plane crash we figure it out, make a mitigation, and make it never happen again. Flying is one of the safest modes of transport and it keeps getting safer.
In hospitals most of them had the car crash mentality for hospital acquired infections. A hospital putting in a plane crash mentality investigator for their Infection Prevention chair will have very different outcomes, especially over time. Someone got an infection from bad clean technique? Make it a checklist item. Someone still got another infection? Change gloving technique so that you wear two layers and only touch the outer gloves with clean inner gloves. Another case? Have a second staff member assist with your donning of PPE and going through the checklist. Each step reduces the risk, each mitigation makes everyone safer. Eventually you have so few infections it is hard to test new processes.
For anyone wondering edgydoc.com is the site for the aforementioned doctor and he is a blast. But yeah, if you treat a consequence as a cost of doing business nothing changes. If you make failure an existential risk you can eliminate problems. Corporations are run by people. Those people should be accountable for the crimes of the company.
Fantastic post, thanks for writing that all up!
This is a great reminder that even large or complex problems can be solved if you break them down and analyze them methodically. Rather than saying “we’re doomed, everyone abandon ship!”, you can stop and think for a moment.
We should always be willing to ask ourselves how much we want a problem to be solved, because it’s entirely possible that there is a reachable solution to that problem and it could be in our best interest to address it rather than putting it off.