"Bill of Health"-Hospital Safety Flight Plan
Thursday, October 11, 2007PAUL KANGAS: In most jobs, mistakes are inevitable. But that's not what you want to hear if you're flying in a plane or about to go under the surgeon's knife. In his latest "Bill of Health," Jeff Yastine looks at how lessons from commercial aviation about minimizing human error can make hospitals safer and more efficient.
JEFF YASTINE, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: When we step on an airplane, most of us take it as a given that we will wind up safely at our destination. Air travel is considered routine. But those safety levels are due in part to something called "crew resource management" or CRM. It's a way of communication and teamwork that flight crews have used for decades. CRM lowers the chance of human error causing a catastrophic problem during the flight. Now, if only that were the case in hospital medicine. One government report estimates that up to 70,000 people die each year in hospitals as a result of preventable human errors.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What went wrong? Communication, yes -loss of situational awareness is what we say in aviation.
YASTINE: And that's where trainers from an aviation group called Lifewings...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Over and over and over again, and they still made a mistake.
YASTINE: ...come into play
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The best and the brightest in this room can make a mistake, period.
YASTINE: Jim Brigadier is a 30-year retired Marine Corps pilot and a Lifewings medical risk management instructor.
JIM BRIGADIER, MEDICAL RISK MANAGEMENT INSTRUCTOR, LIFEWINGS: In aviation, we have been evolving of this in a period of over 30 years. We are at what we call six sigma, which is statistical perfection. If you're flying from Fort Lauderdale to San Diego, you have a 99.9996 percent chance of making it. That's good. We're trying to bring this to the same level, working as a team together to eliminate the mistakes.
YASTINE: A landmark 1998 report from the National Institutes of Health first documented hospital error rates and the deaths they cause. It was a generally a problem that only came to light when a medical malpractice case was filed. Today, some states publish hospital error rates on the Internet and Medicare links hospital reimbursements to patient safety. Dr. Stanley Marks is a surgeon and chief medical officer at Memorial healthcare system in Hollywood, Florida, where the months-long Lifewings process is underway.
DR. STANLEY MARKS, CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER, MEMORIAL HEALTHCARE SYSTEM: If you reduce harm in a healthcare system, certainly you do it because it's the right thing to do. But additionally, you get efficiencies. Patients are moved through the system much more efficiently. Costs are lower. Errors cost money. Not only do they cause pain, but they cost dollars. And if we can do things harm-free, we will absolutely be more efficient and more cost effective.
YASTINE: The bigger question is whether the lessons learned by flight crews really work in a hospital environment. Studies from groups like the Federally-funded Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality say they do. For these nurses, technicians and doctors, this is just the start of their education, which will continue for months as trainers help them apply in the hospital the lessons learned about cutting human error in the air. Jeff Yastine, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, "Bill of Health."
