virheriski

Virheriski is a risk-management term describing the risk that human errors will lead to adverse outcomes. It highlights individuals’ actions within complex systems and is considered alongside equipment failures as a contributor to accidents. The term is used in European safety discussions to categorize risks arising from human factors in fields such as healthcare, aviation, manufacturing, and information technology.

Contributing factors include cognitive overload, fatigue, interruptions, miscommunication, insufficient training, ambiguous procedures, and poor user interface design. Organizational factors such as safety culture, workload management, and incentives can also influence the likelihood and impact of virheriski.

Assessment often relies on incident reporting, root-cause analysis, and human reliability analysis to estimate probability and consequences. Virheriski is treated as a component of overall risk rather than a single event, and is often described with qualitative scales or probabilistic estimates.

Mitigation focuses on preventing errors and limiting their impact: clear standard operating procedures, checklists, error-proofing, automation and decision-support tools, better training, workload management, and a safety culture that encourages reporting and learning from mistakes.

Related concepts include human factors, safety culture, and reliability engineering. Critics argue that overemphasizing human error can obscure system flaws, so modern approaches aim to redesign processes and organizations to reduce both the likelihood and severity of mistakes.