Why Do We Remember the One Bad Shift... and Not the 10 Good Ones?
You can have ten good shifts.
Ten shifts where patients are cared for safely, the team works brilliantly, problems are spotted before they become incidents and thousands of things simply go right.
And then you have one bad shift.
Guess which one your brain wants to talk about at 3am? 😂
In Episode 5 of Behind the Uniform, Josie and Gemma explore why negative experiences seem to stick with us and whether healthcare itself sometimes reinforces that way of thinking.
We get a little bit nerdy in this one...
🧠 Negativity bias — why bad experiences can have a disproportionate impact on how we think and remember
🩺 Safety-I — learning from incidents, harm, errors and things that go wrong
💙 Safety-II — turning the question around and asking why healthcare goes right so much of the time
📊 Why clinical governance traditionally collects enormous amounts of data about failure, but perhaps not enough about success
👏 Learning from Excellence — what we can learn from teams, systems and individuals when care goes really well
📚 Gemma's Library of Yeses — deliberately noticing and storing the good experiences our brains can be very quick to dismiss
None of this means ignoring incidents, complaints, risk or harm.
We absolutely need to understand what goes wrong.
But if we want to understand what makes healthcare safe, perhaps we also need to understand what makes it go right.
Because behind every uniform is a human being. 💙
🧠 Baumeister et al. – Bad is Stronger than Good
The classic research paper exploring why negative events, emotions and feedback can have a greater psychological impact than positive experiences.
https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323
🩺 NHS England – Safety Culture
NHS England describes safety culture as one of the foundations of the NHS Patient Safety Strategy and discusses using a Safety-II inspired approach to understand everyday work and learn from what supports safe care.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/patient-safety/patient-safety-culture/safety-culture/
🔎 NHS England – Safety Culture: Learning from Best Practice
A particularly relevant resource for this episode. NHS England used a Safety-II inspired approach to look at organisations rated Good or Outstanding for safety and asked what could be learnt from what they were doing well.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/safety-culture-learning-from-best-practice/
💡 Learning from Excellence – Evidence & Resources
Research, publications and practical resources exploring positive reporting, appreciative inquiry and how healthcare organisations can learn from excellent practice as well as adverse events.
https://learningfromexcellence.com/resources-and-evidence/
🏥 Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists – Safety-I and Safety-II
A really accessible explanation of the difference between learning from what goes wrong and understanding how everyday healthcare usually succeeds.
https://www.rcog.org.uk/about-us/quality-improvement-clinical-audit-and-research-projects/each-baby-counts-learn-support/safety-thinking-toolkit/safety-i-and-safety-ii/
Behind the Uniform is intended for education, professional reflection and general discussion.
The conversations shared are based on professional experience, current evidence and our respective areas of practice, but should not replace individual clinical judgement, organisational policies and procedures, professional guidance or personalised healthcare or psychological advice.
Any clinical examples or scenarios discussed are anonymised, adapted or hypothetical to protect confidentiality.
The views and experiences discussed are our own and do not necessarily represent those of any organisation, employer, regulator or professional body.
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