Hospitals Look at Aviation for Safety Insights
The aviation world overhauled its work procedures three decades ago following a collision between two Boeing 747s killing 583 people in 1977 in Tenerife. The accident was caused by several mis-communications between flight crews and air traffic control. In its wake and under NASA’s lead, communication protocols and team communication were reworked into what has been first dubbed Cockpit Resource Management and is now known as Crew Resource Management (CRM). CRM recognizes the importance of human factors in complex, stressful, tiring and risky environments.
The New York Times reports today how the Institute of Medicine and other healthcare institutions have recommended, starting five years ago, that healthcare personnel follow similar training as well as take inspiration from how aviation handles error reporting. Pre-operative briefings, post-op debriefings, checklists and procedures can contribute to better team performance by being both more flexible to use input from all team members (not just the boss) and more rigorous by making sure things like drug incompatibilities are avoided.
Additional reading: Crew Resource Management and its Applications in Medicine.
October 31, 2006 Related topics: Quality, Safety, Errors