Discussions about patient safety in hospitals represent a global trend and the topic is often approached in the media. Despite all the advances in the context of patient safety, human error is one fact that stands out. Often, reported errors involving healthcare professionals in hospitals in the press and media cause a lot of social pressure. For the staff involved, the lack of understanding about the mistakes can cause feelings of shame, guilt and fear, given that a strong punitive culture still exists in some institutions which also contributes to the omission of such episodes. For healthcare professionals, the occurrence of adverse events can cause various problems, considering the emotional stress, ethical commands and legal penalties to which they are exposed. Therefore, investing in a safety culture is important through spreading the concept of patient safety and discussing side effects without punishment. From a management point of view, managers of healthcare facilities must realize that adverse events are often directly related to system failure, rather than negligence or incompetence. Therefore, instead of looking for the culprits, it is necessary to identify existing weaknesses in the process and adopt preventive measures. Awareness of errors in health care has skyrocketed in recent years, and enormous resources have been mobilized to measure and reduce harm. Current recommendations for improvement have ignored the costs of prevention. The current proliferation of safety goals and required or recommended safe practices threatens to overwhelm a hospital's capacity to safely implement change, but the cost-effectiveness of most proposed improvements remains unknown. Hospitals are complex systems that depend heavily on human performance, so improving hospital safety is not simple. Any changes should be implemented with an understanding of human factors engineering and safety science, and even good changes can create unexpected new hazards. Increased security measures reduce preventable adverse events, but generally impose direct costs (for implementing security precautions) and hidden costs (in the form of delays, new errors, or lost opportunities elsewhere). Perfect security is not always possible, and near-perfect security can impose unacceptably high costs.