PJ2
You might understand that any post looking at medical situations and airline incidents makes my ears prick up.
Firstly diagnosis is a little different in medicine from that in an aircraft. Much medical effort is spent in getting to a diagnosis (and often many co-morbidities) but this does not interrupt the treatment of symptoms.
The concept of "preventable death" interests me deeply and I spend much of my working life probing this issue. I have certainly not found any definition of that term which stands up to scrutiny.
Preventable for how long? None of us live forever so there is going to be a spectrum of situations from a death which could have been postponed until other factors took over and resulted in death, to an incident where the situation was so hopeless that a small error which if avoided may have led to a few more minutes of life, with all the quality of life issues which accompany such events.
In theory, all air accidents are preventable, whereas all medical deaths are not. I'm not being flippant. Would a suicide be classed as a preventable death? Largely it is, but the motives of a potential suicide can be incredibly powerful and evasive to detection.
If an aircraft is given the necessary forces to stay airborne it will, whereas people sometimes just want to die, and will do so even if the biological processes are not sufficient to result in death.
I would like to categorically lay to rest (pun fully intended) the myth that doctors do not have any scrutiny over each and every case they deal with. They certainly do. If they did not, I would be out of work, and believe me my desk is piled high.
Certainly CRM is giving us in healthcare some very valuable lessons and I want to know more how it works, but there are some concepts which simply do not exist in even such a controlled envinronment as an operating room. The cohesive team cannot be fully defined in an OR as there are several teams involved, each with differing priorities which often clash. This may be a concept which captains may not appreciate as in an aircraft they are the final say whereas in an OR the surgeon certainly is not the captain of the OR.
MD