If Pilots, or the airline industry in general, would have been on the same level of quality, quality assurance and failure management as medical doctors, at least once a week a plane would crash. That’s a bold statement but as a matter of fact and as unfortunate as it sounds, there is underlying truth to this statement. Especially since a report, issued by the U.S. Institute of Medicine, in 1999 there is more than enough proof that todays medical and healthcare system lacks serious failure management. The study entitled “To err is human” generated quite a buzz back then, yet it should be taught, repeated and internalized by medical hospital directors, physicians and people working in the healthcare system at least once a year. The report largely deals with preventable deaths due to medical errors. Surgeons operating on monday mornings, missing check lists, psychological factors between people working in a medical environment and many many other factors were identified of why people die unnecessarily and why phyisicians are unsatisfied with their jobs. In the U.S., the study had a remarkable impact on how physicians act and work, yet in Europe people mostly neglected the results. An average of 195,000 people in the USA died due to potentially preventable, in-hospital medical errors in each of the years 2000, 2001 and 2002, according to a new study of 37 million patient records that was released today by HealthGrades, the healthcare quality company via medicalnewstoday.com That’s jaw-dropping and it’s 2011! After “to err is human” was first published, people were desperately looking for ways to eliminate human failure and ended up in the airline industry. The airline industry, is among the safest industries existing nowadays. By combining a range of very simple communication techniques and rather complex redundant systems the rate of failures in this industry has significantly dropped. In most European healthcare-systems, these techniques and redundant systems have never found their way into clinical practice. The diagnosis and the treatment of a patient is therefore highly dependent on the individual physician’s mental and physical situation, his/her work-life-balance, the equipment he/she is surrounded with and how well he/she is embedded in the team. Among others, there are 5 important things that physicians can learn from pilots: Always double check Follow and respect guidelines (evidence based medicine vs. eminence based medicine) Training, training, training Do what you can do best and ask others for the rest Respect your collegues It’s time that physicians start looking at pilots. Where we need fundamental and necessary systematic approaches to avoid medical error. Why? Because “to err is human” and physicians are ultimately more human than many other people. We need to accept that fact and act accordingly to make medicine a lot safer – for both the patient and the physician. Written by MedCunch , one of the best magazines about medicine and health
