A tragic anecdote has shaken France recently, when an unsupervised 6-year old entered a NICU, took a premature baby and dropped her on the floor. She died of her injuries a few hours later.
The same questions are being asked: how come anyone can enter a NICU? How could the parents let an unsupervised child roam the hospital? How come no one intervened? The worst part is that other parents had complained about the unsupervised child the day before.
Failures all along... that's often how accidents happen.
I wish there was a solid way to balance the weight of a tragedy (sans the kneejerk human emotional reaction) against the proposed solution.
Freak accidents will always happen, and if mitigation is simple and cheap, we should do it. But as soon as we get into the territory of "NICU doors need to be locked with keycard access" (causing every doctor and nurse to do a badge scan 40-50 times a day) then I think it's ok to have 1 infant death every 50 years globally because of it.
My rule of thumb for any big organization (like a hospital) is that nothing changes until there's a body to explain away.
Yeah, sometimes enough fractional close calls add up (usually to a big lawsuit) and policy changes without and death, but don't bet on it.
But, on the other end of the spectrum, having all sorts of absurd policy and procedure because someone might die so incredibly rarely we can't quantify it is terrible too.
The same questions are being asked: how come anyone can enter a NICU? How could the parents let an unsupervised child roam the hospital? How come no one intervened? The worst part is that other parents had complained about the unsupervised child the day before.
Failures all along... that's often how accidents happen.