Submitted as part of requirements for completion of Masters of Public Management at Victoria University of Wellington

This literature review examines error in child protection work. It considers how child protection services have approached professional error as it contributes to child protection incidents and how effective this approach has been. It also reviews whether child protection services have considered models for improving safety from other systems, and discusses the application of the Reason model of human and organisational error to child protection services. James Reason (2000), used information from accident investigations to develop a conceptual framework to improve safety. This model takes a system approach to analysing and reducing error, rather than a person approach. A system approach focuses on the role of the organisation. The review concludes that, unlike health services, child protection services have not traditionally looked to other paradigms to improve the safety of their practices. The author notes that the similarity between child protection incidents and organisational accidents are such that it justifies using concepts from the error model to improve the safety of child protection services.

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