A study of medication errors in nursing homes suggests they can be curtailed by talk and technology. Researchers under supervision of Professor Jill Scott-Cawiezell have watched 16-thousand medications being delivered in nursing homes and they’ve seen how good people working hard face situations in which errors are produced. Cawiezell, who is with the nursing school at the University of Missouri-Columbia, says nursing home staff members are aware of all of the errors…but leaders often are aware of less than five percent of them. She says nursing home administators need to cultivate a culture of safety. But she says it’s contrary to the way business has often been done in which someone who makes a mistake is branded as “bad.” She says the culture of safety leads to an understand that most mistakes in health care are failures of systems that set up people for mistakes. She says technology is a system that can alleviate opportunities for errors by providing more accurate record-keeping and better direction. But she says it is important for management to understand how life happens to the staff, listen to staff problems, and take steps to solve the problems instead of assessing blame. Her research is published in the professional journal “Nursing Forum.”