[SystemSafety] Comparison of Confidential vs Non-Confidential Reporting Systems

[Eric Marsden]

On 17/10/2018 14:49, Mike Rothon wrote:
> I am looking for some recommended reading on the respective merits of 
> confidential and non-confidential (open?) reporting systems with 
> respect to 'safety events'.
>
> Aviation is one sector that has generally embraced the confidential 
> reporting approach, whilst anecdotally I hear that it isn't (yet) used 
> so widely in the medical sector.
>
> In general, I am trying to understand why it is considered to be 
> beneficial for aviation, but not necessarily elsewhere.

The literature on this topic is a little fragmented, because different 
industry sectors use different terms: operational experience feedback, 
organizational learning, lessons learned analysis. Beyond aviation, 
several high-hazard industry sectors have well-developed systems (and 
favourable organizational cultures) for learning from experience, 
including nuclear energy and offshore oil & gas.

I can suggest a hopefully practitioner-oriented overview on the 
obstacles to learning from safety events, from a working group that I 
have been involved in:

https://esreda.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ESReDA-barriers-learning-accidents-1.pdf

I would suggest that it is useful to put in place *both* confidential 
and non-confidential reporting (and -- important -- analysis & learning) 
systems, and to link them with data that is often collected 
automatically in modern systems. A reporting / learning culture is 
necessary for the non-confidential experience feedback system to work 
effectively, and changes in cultural features of organizations occur 
only very slowly, but over time the confidential reporting mechanism 
should be used less and less, and become almost a whistleblower channel 
(almost because in the related literature, the term whistleblower refers 
to someone who exhausts internal reporting channels and uses outside 
channels such as the media or the regulator).

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