Positive Healthcare Results

Commercial airlines' flight crews have learned to make fewer errors. This improved safety record is due not to better technology or more highly skilled pilots, but to a leadership and team training course called "crew resource management."

Team training works: At my department at Children's Hospital of Boston, our medical error rates have dropped to zero after airline pilots taught us team training, and team training resulted in lower rates and more satisfied patients in the cardiac surgery surgery program at another New England hospital.

As individuals, we are prone to making mistakes, but as part of high-performance teams, we can avoid or minimize those mistakes. And that means better patient outcomes.

Gerald B. Healy, MD Otolaryngologist in Chief, Children's Hospital in Boston Professor of Otology and Larygology at Harvard Medical School President, American College of Surgeons Boston Globe January 8, 2008
 
Team training works: At my
department at Children's Hospital
of Boston, our medical error rates
have dropped to zero after airline
pilots taught us team training


Dynamics Research Corporation and investigators from Brown University and Madigan Army Medical Center looked at... a chain of errors involving.poor communication and a lack of cross-monitoring of other caregiver's work.

  • They identified 8.8 team errors (mostly in communication) per case.
  • They concluded that 50% of the harm done in such cases could have been averted with medical team training and implementation.

In subsequent studies,
  • They observed an 80% decrease in observed errors and fewer cases referred to risk management after medical team training.

   
  • A fiscal analysis suggested that $4 per patient could be immediately saved if medical team training were implemented.

Shari J. Welsh, MD
University of Utah School of Medicine
February 2007

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