Just Culture Must Begin in School

I have been reading peer-reviewed and industry-published articles about "Just Culture" for well over a decade now. However, I cannot widely find this espoused environment of transparency, learning and sharing, personal accountability, and non-punitive error reporting. "Just Culture" seems to be not discussed or viewed either an impossible goal in both hospitals and the schools preparing our future nurses and other healthcare professionals. Why do we still cling to meting out punishment when errors are found? We certainly have seen how successful the aviation industry has been with implementing Just Culture policies and procedures and the resulting increased safety. I wonder if punishment for wrongdoing is one of nursing's most sacred cows because so many nurses experienced abuse for their own errors that they cannot get past their learned way of dealing with errors. When teaching pediatric nursing and explaining the decades' of solid evidence of harm from spanking children, I inevitably have students who say, "But I was spanked as a child, and look how well I turned out!" Perhaps a punitive approach to errors is the same thing. As nurses and leaders, we must get past the idea that because we trained in rules-based, authoritarian programs in which we constantly feared "write-ups," and we "turned out okay" that this should continue.