The Recipe for Medical Errors: This One Takes the Cake

We now know that most serious medical errors – including the biggies like wrong-site surgery – stem from communication failures. But these types of failures aren’t unique to medicine. Here’s a sidesplitting one from the cake-baking business.

Thanks to John Nelson for pointing this one out to me, from the blog “Cake Wrecks.” (Yes, a blog devoted to chronicling “when professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong.” What did we ever do before the Web?). The story is hard to verify, but – if medical errors are any judge – I’m guessing that it’s true. Here goes:

[Answering phone] “Cakey Cake Bakery, Jill speaking! How can I help you?”

“Hi, I need to order a cake for my boss. We have a photo of him playing golf that we’d like to put on it, though – can you do that?”

“Of course! Just bring the photo in on a USB drive and we’ll print it out here.”

“Great, I’ll bring it by this afternoon.”

A while later…

“Hey, Jill, what am I putting on this cake?”

[Calling from the back room] “Oh, check the counter; I left the jump drive out for you there.”

“Really? This is what they want on the cake?”

“Yeah, the customer just brought it in.”

“Okey dokey!”

And here’s the resulting cake!!!

[The original blog post is here, accompanied by nearly 200 comments!]  

This enters my Pantheon of Screw-ups, not quite reaching the pinnacle – that position is securely occupied by the poor guy who found himself being mistakenly interviewed on live BBC television (about intellectual property law) when he showed up for a job interview. But it’s pretty good.

All these cases share similar recipes: two-parts sloppy processes mixed with one-part “it must be right” (the most dangerous words in any complex organization, by the way), often sprinkled with a few tablespoons of time pressure. It’s a recipe that is also common to most medical errors.

The difference, of course, is that their glitches wreck cakes, while ours can harm and kill people.