About the author
Carl Macrae is an applied psychologist specialising in how organisations achieve high levels of safety, reliability and resilience and build cultures of learning and improvement. His research examines how risk events and other disruptive incidents are analysed and learnt from, and how organisational and regulatory systems can be designed to support adaptation and improvement.
Carl is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Psychology in the Centre for Health Innovation, Leadership and Learning at Nottingham University Business School. He is also a Professor II in the SHARE Centre for Resilience in Healthcare at University of Stavanger, Norway, a Research Associate at the London School of Economics Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation and a Chartered Psychologist.
He regularly advises organisations, regulators and policymakers on challenging safety and risk issues. Recently, Carl’s work has led to the establishment in England of the first national, learning-focused safety investigation body for healthcare, the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB), and he has acted as Specialist Advisor and been called as an expert witness to Parliamentary Select Committee inquiries.
Previously he has been a Health Foundation Improvement Science Fellow, Special Advisor at the NHS National Patient Safety Agency, Associate Director of Research and Evaluation at the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch and an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow. He has held academic appointments at Imperial College London, London School of Economics, University of Oxford and University of Leicester. He has also been an academic visitor at Stanford University, University of California San Francisco, Australian National University and Cranfield University.
Currently he is researching the risk analysis and safety governance of artificial intelligence in complex sociotechnical systems like healthcare.