Large language models (LLMs) are now routinely used to write clinical notes, discharge summaries, referral letters, patient instructions and insurance correspondence. Their appeal is obvious: they are fast, fluent and usually accurate. As the documentation burden increases and clinical time shrinks, AI-generated text is becoming embedded in everyday clinical workflows. The dominant safety response has …
Diagnosis is a classification task: a patient has symptoms, the symptoms map to a list of possible conditions, the clinician selects the best label. This is an appealingly simple way to define how medicine works and in many cases, it’s good enough. In others, quite inadequate. Diagnosis can be straightforward – when the patient presents …
Loud music: the new smoking If you join an exercise class at your local gym, one thing will probably strike you immediately – loud music with a thumping bass, and an even louder instructor. The strike isn’t metaphorical. Noise physically damages one of the human body’s most delicate and precious structures: the inner ear. Many …
If a treatment came along that reduced surgical complications by up to 30%, lowered error rates, and decreased mortality, while also reducing burnout, depression and staff turnover, we would rush to adopt it. If it was simple, cheap and without side-effects, its popularity might rival the latest GLP-1 agonist. The “treatment” actually exists but isn’t …
A HIDden free treatment that improves outcomes for patients and staff Read More »
China is running enormous experiments with Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the clinical encounter. But how well do these systems actually perform? Are they safe for patients? I look for evidence and discuss what countries like SA should take from China’s rapid healthcare AI rollout. Why China is Pursuing Autonomous AI China’s drive toward autonomous AI …
Evaluating China’s push into autonomous Clinical AI Read More »
When the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed in March 2024, headlines focused on the enormous scale of the disaster: six lives lost, a major port paralysed and a reconstruction bill estimated at $5 billion. Behind the tragedy is a story for healthcare. Image: NTSB https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20251118.aspx Investigators have traced the initial failure on the …
The $5 billion lesson: how one loose wire brought down a bridge Read More »
Human + AI: Winning Team? In 2009, Charles Friedman articulated what he called the “Fundamental Theorem of Informatics”: a person working in partnership with an information resource is better than that same person unassisted. For decades, this has been a bedrock principle of biomedical informatics. It’s a simple idea: computers augment human capability. A calculator …
A reflection on human attention and patient safety At the October 2025 American Society of Anesthesiology (ASA) meeting Dr Joyce Wahr delivered the prestigious John W. Severinghaus Lecture with a message for all of healthcare: most errors are not the result of carelessness, incompetence or insufficient effort. They are predictable outcomes of how the human …
It’s not your fault! The cognitive basis of medical error Read More »
More than 25 years after the modern “quality movement” took off, healthcare is still not as safe as we want it to be. Checklists, protocols and investigations have helped, but improvement has slowed while care has become more complex. Medical teams work in settings where conditions often shift rapidly, the margin for error is slim, …
Basketball, rugby, football and Ted Lasso: lessons from sport for safety in healthcare Read More »
