Bill
Thanks for the email
You have received some good comments above which are much more relevant to making the medical system safer than what I am going to talk about.
I am going to offer comment about your actual question regarding why pilots have a different attitude to the rules than doctors. You wonder what it is in their training that brings this about. I suggest that the first time a pilot flies solo it is immediately apparent that he can die if he does not live by the rules. This is a good incentive to stick to the rules and also to accept extra rules in the future once they become developed through the experience of the aviation community.
Pilot breaks rules - pilot dies. Doctor breaks rules - patient dies. Not the same thing.
It gets better. When a pilot breaks the rules and might well have died but actually gets away with it (through good luck or skill or both) he now has a very good talking point at the bar and will certainly brag about what he has got away with. This sort of word tends to spread. He is not keeping the event to himself and feeling bad, he is singing his head off and feeling good.
Once a pilot gets a job ferrying 400 people behind him, we hope that he has a real grasp of the rules and can be truly relied upon to stick to them in spades, because if he doesn’t he will die and he knows this. (The others behind will die as well but that never crosses his mind. After all he does sit in the front and that is the worst place to be if you hit something)
The culture of total honesty and professional integrity is not easy to encourage in any trade. For the reasons I have mentioned I think such a culture is a tad more likely to be alive and well in the flying business.
I have used "he" throughout quite deliberately. In my experience men are more ego driven, more casual about danger (indeed may even seek it) and certainly are more given to brag than ladies. So some of my comments are not so generally applicable to the modern breed of very good lady pilots.
The bottom line though is that the systems that are used in the flying business to encourage safety (and rule observation) are now quite sophisticated and could easily be transplanted (sorry) to a medical profession that wanted to reduce the effects of the errors that we humans make and always will.
Good luck with your project
Regards