Counterheroism, common knowledge, and ergonomics: concepts from aviation that could improve patient safety.

CONTEXT: Many safety initiatives have been transferred successfully from commercial aviation to health care. This article develops a typology of aviation safety initiatives, applies this to health care, and proposes safety measures that might be adopted more widely. It then presents an economic framework for determining the likely costs and benefits of different patient safety initiatives. METHODS: This article describes fifteen examples of error countermeasures that are used in public transport aviation, many of which are not routinely used in health care at present. Examples are the sterile cockpit rule, flight envelope protection, the first-names-only rule, and incentivized no-fault reporting. It develops a conceptual schema that is then used to argue why analogous initiatives might be usefully applied to health care and why physicians may resist them. Each example is measured against a set of economic criteria adopted from the taxation literature. FINDINGS: The initiatives considered in the article fall into three themes: safety concepts that seek to downplay the role of heroic individuals and instead emphasize the importance of teams and whole organizations; concepts that seek to increase and apply group knowledge of safety information and values; and concepts that promote safety by design. The salient costs to be considered by organizations wishing to adopt these suggestions are the compliance costs to clinicians, the administration costs to the organization, and the costs of behavioral distortions. CONCLUSIONS: This article concludes that there is a range of safety initiatives used in commercial aviation that could have a positive impact on patient safety, and that adopting such initiatives may alter the safety culture of health care teams. The desirability of implementing each initiative, however, depends on the projected costs and benefits, which must be assessed for each situation.

The case for human factors training.

The Association for Perioperative Practice has taken a leading role in raising awareness of the importance of human factors in healthcare. We at Atrainability (2011) have been privileged to run training courses on human factors to association members at the last two annual conferences and also at venues throughout the UK. The funding has been provided by the Hilda Mears trust.

Improving patient safety by identifying latent failures in successful operations.

BACKGROUND: The risk of technical failure during operations is recognized, but there is evidence that further improvements in safety depend on systems factors, in particular, effective team skills. The hypotheses that small problems can escalate to more serious situations and that effective teamwork can prevent the development of serious situations, were examined to develop a method to assess these skills and to provide evidence for improvements in training and systems. METHOD(S): Observations were made during 24 pediatric cardiac and 18 orthopedic operations. Operations were classified by accepted indicators of risk and the observations used to generate indicators of performance. Negative events were recorded and organized into 3 levels of clinical importance (minor problems, those negative events that were seemingly innocuous; intraoperative performance, the proportion of key operating tasks that were disrupted; and major problems, events that compromised directly the safety of the patient or the quality of the treatment). The ability of the team to work together safely was classified using a validated scale adapted from research in aviation. Operative duration was also recorded. RESULT(S): Both escalation and teamwork hypotheses were supported. Multiple linear regression suggests that for every 3 minor problems above the 9.9 expected per operation (P <.001), intraoperative performance reduces by 1% (P = .005), and operative duration increases by 10 minutes (P = .032). Effective teams have fewer minor problems per operation (P = .035) and consequently higher intraoperative performance and shorter operating times. Operative risk affected intraoperative performance (P = .004) and duration (P <.001), with the type of operation affecting only duration (P <.001). Eight major problems were observed; these showed a strong association with risk, intraoperative performance, teamwork, and the number of minor problems. CONCLUSION(S): Structured observation of effective teamwork in the operating room can identify substantive deficiencies in the system, even in otherwise successful operations. Decreasing the number of minor problems can lead to a smoother, safer, and shorter operation. Effective teamwork can help decrease the number of small problems and prevent them from escalating to more serious situations. The most effective and sustainable route to improved safety is in capturing these minor problems and identifying related system improvements, combined with training in safe team working. This method is a validated and practical way to improve performance during otherwise successful operations.