Health Care, Aviation, and Ecosystems: A Socio-Natural Systems Perspective

Efforts to improve the delivery of health care have led scholars to look to other safety-critical industries for comparisons that may serve as models. We flesh out one popular comparison: aviation, an industry made exceptionally safe in large part due to the efforts of applied experimental and applied social psychologists. A number of aspects of the aviation industry are similar to those of health care. However, there are also limitations of the analogy, and we suggest that any analogy to an engineered system like that of aviation will capture only some aspects of the health-care system. We suggest health care is a socio-natural system and thus invites interventions appropriate for ecosystems.