Aviation and healthcare: a comparative review with implications for patient safety

Abstract

Safety in aviation has often been compared with safety in healthcare. Following a recent article in this journal, the UK government set up an Independent Patient Safety Investigation Service, to emulate a similar well-established body in aviation. On the basis of a detailed review of relevant publications that examine patient safety in the context of aviation practice, we have drawn up a table of comparative features and a conceptual framework for patient safety. Convergence and divergence of safety-related behaviours across aviation and healthcare were derived and documented. Key safety-related domains that emerged included Checklists, Training, Crew Resource Management, Sterile Cockpit, Investigation and Reporting of Incidents and Organisational Culture. We conclude that whilst healthcare has much to learn from aviation in certain key domains, the transfer of lessons from aviation to healthcare needs to be nuanced, with the specific characteristics and needs of healthcare borne in mind. On the basis of this review, it is recommended that healthcare should emulate aviation in its resourcing of staff who specialise in human factors and related psychological aspects of patient safety and staff wellbeing. Professional and post-qualification staff training could specifically include Cognitive Bias Avoidance Training, as this appears to play a key part in many errors relating to patient safety and staff wellbeing.

Learning from incidents in health care: Critique from a Safety-II perspective

“…This resulted in the widespread adoption of Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for the investigation of serious untoward incidents , and the implementation of organisation-wide and national incident reporting systems, such as the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS) in the UK (Carruthers and Phillip, 2006). Incidents in health care tend to be higher frequency but lower average severity events compared with other industries (Kapur et al, 2016). As a result, a large number of incidents are reported, and not all of these can be analysed in depth (Anderson and Kodate, 2015).…”

Managing the patient safety risks of bottom-up health information technology innovations: Recommendations for healthcare providers

“…Of course, such events have to be understood and prevented in healthcare, too, as tragic cases repeatedly demonstrate 18 , 24. However, equally relevant in a healthcare context are risks that have relatively high likelihood of occurrence but maybe only moderate severity of consequences 25. These are events that happen relatively often and cause minor or moderate harm, such as many prescribing errors 26.…”

¿quién Y Cómo Se Debe Garantizar La Calidad Del Cirujano?

“…El modo en que los pilotos de aviación [42][43][44] adquieren sus habilidades en forma disciplinada y cómo mantienen sus habilidades son una lección para la profesión quirúrgica.…”