Physician Assistants (PA) & Society Practice Test

FMEA relies on identifying potential failure modes and understanding both why they could occur and how they might escape detection. A Fishbone diagram (Ishikawa) provides a structured way to brainstorm and organize possible causes of a failure, grouping them into categories like people, procedures, equipment, materials, and environment so you can see all contributors at a glance. The Swiss cheese model offers a way to visualize how multiple layers of defense or safeguards have holes, and how those holes alignment can allow a failure to pass through. Using these two together helps you map out both the causes behind a failure and the defensive weaknesses that could let it reach the patient or system, guiding where to focus mitigation efforts. The other tools listed serve different purposes—defect prioritization, process monitoring, project planning, or strategic analysis—and are not the standard pairing used for FMEA.