mercurydancer;
I'm wondering if you've encountered Dr. Atul Gawande's two books, "Complications", and "Better"?
In Complications he states, in part:
"The British psychologist James Reason argues, in his book Human Error, that our propensity for certain types of error is the price we pay for the brain's remarkable ability to think and act intuitively - to sift quickly through the sensory information that constantly bombards us without wasting time trying to work through every situation anew. Thus systems that rely on human perfection present what Reason calls "latent errors' - errors waiting to happen. Medicine teems with examples.
. . . . etc"
In these fascinating books in which he talks quite frankly about medicine, he does take a few moments to discuss approaches to medicine which draw upon the techniques of CRM. Medical people with whom I've discussed these techniques believe there is a strong need. The driving force for aviation was, frankly, "headlines" - a lot of people dying at once, to be blunt about it. I believe the health industry has a fatality rate that is substantially higher than aviation and even higher than the automobile in the US, (> 45,000/year) but because no headlines result, such rates do not "capture the imagination" of medicines' "safety people", (I doubt if there are such dedicated positions - they might be closer to "risk management" positions?).
I think the value of a "human factors" approach modelled after aviation's approach is high and desireable. However, establishing and changing the mentality of the health industry, (where error and resulting fatalities is a "net positive" for some in the same way that the Exxon Valdez was a "net positive" for Alaska because it raised the GNP of the State...), would face inevitable resistance.
As in aviation, such change usually takes a full generation - about 25 to 30 years, to become established.
Thought you might be interested.
PJ2
Last edited by PJ2; 22nd October 2009 at 22:45.