>Pilots solved most of these problems decades ago.
In the safest planes (commercial airliners), pilots have systems recording their control inputs, and these can be used to directly attribute damage to/loss of the airframe to pilot malfeasance; the shame of a clear screwup will be clearly documented and in most cases, divulged to the public.
Medical professionals, on the other hand, seem to face a lower standard of accountability simply because it's truly far more difficult (if not impossible in some cases) to monitor all the variables associated with treating a patient compared to monitoring human-designed systems. I have to wonder if this epistemic quagmire where cause and effect are not necessarily tracked (and in some cases, not even truly understood) leads to a mindset that is more willing to write off negative outcomes as the result of external factors (comorbidity, patient age, patient adherence to physician instructions, even pure luck/probability) than tackle the tough problem of correlating personal behaviors and actions to distinct outcomes.
It's not hard to record all patient-doctor interactions. But it is almost certainly illegal in most jurisdictions, supposedly for patient privacy reasons.
That this also helps making doctor mistreatment claims hard to prove is hopefully an unintentional side effect. But you have to wonder...
In the safest planes (commercial airliners), pilots have systems recording their control inputs, and these can be used to directly attribute damage to/loss of the airframe to pilot malfeasance; the shame of a clear screwup will be clearly documented and in most cases, divulged to the public.
Medical professionals, on the other hand, seem to face a lower standard of accountability simply because it's truly far more difficult (if not impossible in some cases) to monitor all the variables associated with treating a patient compared to monitoring human-designed systems. I have to wonder if this epistemic quagmire where cause and effect are not necessarily tracked (and in some cases, not even truly understood) leads to a mindset that is more willing to write off negative outcomes as the result of external factors (comorbidity, patient age, patient adherence to physician instructions, even pure luck/probability) than tackle the tough problem of correlating personal behaviors and actions to distinct outcomes.