Cyrus Dugger

What Pilots Can Teach Hospitals About Patient Safety

The disturbing truth about medical errors is that there are a lot of them. Moreover, many of these errors are completely preventable.

October 31, 2006 What Pilots Can Teach Hospitals About Patient Safety By KATE MURPHY

Wearing scrubs and slouching in their chairs, the emergency room staff members, assembled for a patient-safety seminar, largely ignored the hospital’s chief executive while she made her opening remarks. They talked on their cellphones and got up to freshen their coffee or snag another danish.

But the room became still and silent when an airline pilot who used to fly F-14 Tomcats for the Navy took the lectern. Handsome, upright and meticulously dressed, the pilot began by recounting how in 1977, a series of human errors caused two Boeing 747s to collide on a foggy runway in the Canary Islands, killing 583 people. Riveted, a surgeon gripped his pen with both hands as if he might break it, an anesthetist stopped maniacally chewing his gum, and a wide-eyed nurse bit her lip.

An attention grabber, yes, but what does an airplane crash have to do with patient safety?

A growing number of health care providers are trying to learn from aviation accidents and, more specifically, from what the airlines have done to prevent them. In the last five years, several major hospitals have hired professional pilots to train their critical-care staff members on how to apply aviation safety principles to their work.

They learn standard cockpit procedures like communication protocols, checklists and crew briefings to improve patient care, if not save patients’ lives. Though health care experts disagree on how to incorporate aviation-based safety measures, few argue about the parallels between the two industries or the value of borrowing the best practices.

Spurred by a 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academies, titled “To Err Is Human,” which estimated that as many as 98,000 patients die annually from preventable medical errors, and by more recent bad publicity from mistakes like amputations of the wrong limbs, many health care providers are redoubling their efforts to improve patient safety.

“We’re where the airline industry was 30 years ago” when a series of fatal mistakes increased scrutiny and provoked change, said Dr. Stephen B. Smith, chief medical officer at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, the teaching hospital for the University of Nebraska. (link)

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