I recently wrote an article – published in
the July/August edition of Professional
Social Work - with Trevor Dale, a former British Airways pilot, about what
social work can learn from civil aviation’s human factors approach to safety.
Regular readers of this blog will not be
surprised to find that the article rehearses many of the arguments which I
regularly put forward here. Just like civil aviation, child protection social
work is a safety critical activity. Its practitioners require effective ways of
learning from failures and mistakes so that they can slowly and progressively
build safer services.
I was quite pleased with a little text box
that the Professional Social Work
editor suggested we include in the article and in particular with its first
bullet point:
“When things go wrong, be slow to blame and quick to learn”.
That could be a moral not just for social work and child protection but for life in general.
“When things go wrong, be slow to blame and quick to learn”.
That could be a moral not just for social work and child protection but for life in general.
