Pilots Give Docs a Lesson, Part II

A couple days ago, I wrote a post about how pilots are teaching hospitals how to improve safety by making it easier for underlings to feel comfortable challenging their superiors. Pilots learned these lessons after the 1977 Canary Islands crash killed more than 500 people. I asked the head of the program, UC San Francisco’s […]

A couple days ago, I wrote a post about how pilots are teaching hospitals how to improve safety by making it easier for underlings to feel comfortable challenging their superiors. Pilots learned these lessons after the 1977 Canary Islands crash killed more than 500 people.

I asked the head of the program, UC San Francisco's Dr. Robert Wachter, for an update. Here's his response:

We have a grant from the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation (Gordon Moore -- "Moore's Law" -- founded Intel) to do this kind of teamwork training on the medical service at three hospitals in Northern California: UCSF, Kaiser Permanente San Francisco, and El Camino Hospital.

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We've trained more than 500 people in an interdisciplinary program, with nurses, doctors, pharmacists, social workers, and clerks working through various scenarios.

Through this work, they are learning principles of teamwork, effective communication, dampening hierarchies, etc.

We are working with a company of commercial airline pilots, who helped us plan the curriculum and who deliver part of the content to the participants...

They have added a wonderful slant to the course -- there are a lot of analogies between aviation and medicine (probably the most powerful thing they say is that they used to think like us -- the Top Gun, do-it-your-own-way, high functional professional... And then they realized that that attitude was killing people).