Error recovery by dialysis technicians.

Experts are believed to make fewer errors than novices. Researchers in other domains have shown that experts not only make less errors, they also detect and recover from these errors better than non-experts. To investigate this phenomenon among dialysis technicians working in hemodialysis, we evaluated the ability of dialysis technicians to detect and recover from healthcare errors. Two clinical cases with embedded errors were created by an expert nephrology nurse. Twenty-four dialysis technician subjects read the cases aloud and then answered a set of related questions. Subjects' error detection and recovery responses were scored against the clinical cases. We found that there was no significant difference between the ability of expert and non-expert dialysis technicians to detect errors. However, expert dialysis technicians recovered from significantly more healthcare errors than less experienced non-expert dialysis technicians. This has implications for training dialysis technicians in better error detection and recovery strategies.