Reducing errors in the patient handoff

Transferring patients to other doctors (be it night float, from ER to medicine ward etc.), is often the source of error. A hospital is using techniques from a Ferrari F1 racing team to help smooth this transition:

The duo invited members of McLaren, a British team that fields race cars in Formula One contests, to provide insights into pit-stop maneuvers. Armed with videos and slides, the racing team described how they used a human-factors expert to study the way their pit crews performed. They also explained how their system for recording errors stressed the small ones that might go unnoticed, not the big ones that everyone knew about.

That point struck a chord with Dr. de Leval. He immediately saw that pit-stop handovers were successful precisely because of an obsession with tiny mistakes, a conclusion similar to the one he had reached in his 2000 paper about arterial-switch operations.

(via Medgadget)

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