Human factors engineering can help make sense of the chaos Information in practice p 673

Last year, my father was told by his family doctor that the cardiologist had found aortic stenosis during a diagnostic evaluation for hypertension. Some time later it transpired that the specialist's diagnosis had been wrongly transmitted. Instead of a major valve defect, my father actually had atherosclerosis, a much more benign diagnosis. The kind of culture that makes this sort of unfortunate miscommunication possible is examined in a paper in this week's BMJ and a recently published government report. 1 2 Their conclusions will come as no surprise to many BMJ readers—that communication between health professionals is a mess.

Both sets of authors offer a series of insightful recommendations on what might be done to improve things. However, there is also a pressing need to define the role of applied research in this area and to accept that …