Page 265 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

Our safety culture spends $1.5 million to find that “pedal misap-
plication” was the major cause of sudden acceleration incidents,
but forces Ray LaHood to say, when presenting these results,
“Nobody up here has ever insinuated the term . . . ‘driver error.’”
Our safety culture leads to enough people avoiding childhood
vaccines to allow measles and whooping cough epidemics to re-
emerge. Our safety culture in the health-care system leads to far
too many deaths attributable to human error, yet programs to
reduce this have been largely ineffective.* Our safety culture leads
to hundreds of millions of dollars annually paid out in lawyers’
fees (the first cases in the class-action lawsuits against Toyota
won’t start being heard until 2013!), but no significant changes
in vehicle accident rates. There is clearly a need for change in the
U.S. safety culture that is not just about regulators, politicians,
and the media—but they are good places to start.

* A case in point is the drive to reduce medical errors that cause thousands of
unnecessary deaths each year in the health-care system. Steven Spear became a
student of the Toyota Production System as a doctoral student and later applied
what he learned to the problem of improving safety in the health-care system.
He was part of a team at the Institute of Medicine that studied health care and
published the famous report “To Err Is Human,” finding “one in every few
hundred [patients] was hurt, and one in every few thousand was killed by medi-
cal misadventures.” The solution was to identify and proliferate medical “best
practices” across health care. A great idea, but unfortunately it has not worked.
A 2010 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that
“In the 10 years since publication of the Institute of Medicine’s report To Err Is
Human, extensive efforts have been undertaken to improve patient safety. The
success of these efforts remains unclear.” See Steven Spear, “Why Best Prac-
tices Haven’t Fixed Health Care”; http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/01/why_best
_practices_havent_fixe.html; and Christopher Landrigan et al., “Temporal
Trends in Rates of Patient Harm Resulting from Medical Care”; http://www
.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1004404.

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