“Most errors I’ve found in any job are made by good people doing their best. No one wakes up in the morning and thinks: ‘I can’t wait to get to work today and damage somebody’,” writes Kindness columnist ANTONIO DI DIO. 

Ain’t it grand how some people tell us to love and support everybody, then articulate a long list of people they judge unworthy, excluding them from their “universal” love. 

Ages ago I showed up to work and my supervisor, a whole year older than me, showed me an X-ray and asked: “What’s this shadow here sunshine?” 

Clever little me said: “It’s Fortensky’s sign” (not its real name but Liz Taylor’s eighth and greatest coiffed husband deserves a mention). Correct, he smiled, then asked: “And what is the significance of this sign?”

Rapidly I explained that it can signify something pretty bad and needs urgent review. 

“Right again!” he smiled and wandered off for us to start seeing the morning’s patients.

”Why do you ask?” said I, basking in the glory of having got something right for once.

“You ordered that X-ray last night, you moron” he said, “and you forgot to check it. Would you like to know if the person is still alive?”

I’ve never felt so heartsick or useless. Luckily, the patient was fine, I learned a great lesson, and the shame and humiliation was only directed at me by me. It made me better at my job and a better person, and 35 years later I’m still plugging away at it.

Doctors have some remarkable stats – every year about seven per cent  of us get a complaint made about us to the authorities, and it is often the most stressful experience people can describe. Of those complaints, 76 per cent result in “no further action” and 97 per cent of them result in no restrictions being placed on the person’s practice.

The medical boards and the regulator regularly state that their interest is the safety of the community, and they wish at every opportunity for the health professionals they see to return and contribute to their community and enjoy their professional careers. And the experience so often improves them.

I like that a lot. Most errors I’ve found in any job are made by good people doing their best. Folks who call someone the wrong name or pronoun, deliver mail to the wrong address, fall over while making your coffee, write illegibly or incorrectly an instruction – whatever – do not set out deliberately to harm anyone. No one wakes up in the morning and thinks: “I can’t wait to get to work today and damage somebody”. 

And yet, everywhere it seems a phalanx of cruel keyboards stand ready to crush anyone who’s erred. Our private and public workplaces have benefited in recent years from a push to ethics and values. Our charities swell proudly to the extent that in Australia most people who suffer from a given condition will have a number of agencies and advocacy groups supporting them.

Yet there remains a group with no name, no unity, no voice and each with a lonely journey ahead, and that is – for want of a better word – the shamed.

People who have publicly been found wanting in some aspect of their role, or a (usually temporary) character fault they have brought to their role. And so many, it seems, are perfectly comfortable to rub it in.

The thing is, if you stand in someone’s shoes, really try, think about it for even five minutes – do you know what kind of day they were having? What was the context of their error? What they’d done before? What the “pass mark” should be in their profession?

If a lawyer is found to have erred and failed to properly defend an innocent person, is she to be the subject of contempt forever? What if she’s magnificently defended hundreds of innocent people (or prosecuted hundreds of guilty ones) over 40 years already – does that not matter any more? What’s the ledger supposed to look like?

Does one error cancel a thousand good things? You know who has the third most ducks in Australian Men’s Test cricket history? Steve Waugh, an all-time great. Failure is part of greatness, and it is part of life.

Many folk who know nothing of someone’s context or character, situation or circumstance, seem terribly firm in their judgments of them.

I think humans share these things – most of them are lovely, and almost all of them improve and learn from painful errors to become better people. I dream of a coalition of the publicly shamed, if forgiven and given another chance, contributing mightily to the world. If we were kind enough to let them.

Antonio Di Dio is a local GP, medical leader and nerd. There are many more of his Kindness columns at citynews.com.au