Nurses, also, often deviate from care practice guidelines, including rules for control of infection, often failing to wash their hands between touching patients, or not administering analgesic medication as required. These are a basic and simple practice, but work contingencies and a lack of appreciation for the seriousness of their actions can drive the behaviour to the most simple and least-effort route of care.

Similarly, dentists unnecessarily expose patients to x-rays because they fail to correctly follow procedural guidelines closely enough. And so on. There are lots of different examples of this kind of problem.

A further example is the high error rate in care procedures for older people in old people�s homes. You also cannot have failed to notice the recent spate of medical and nursing �errors� in Hong Kong�s hospitals, ranging from incorrect dialysis procedures through to medication errors.