PJ2
As always a valuable post from you. I value the posts and posters on this site as it has been extremely beneficial to my professional development.
I have been thinking about much of your post today and done a little research.
Both the airline industry and healthcare share a mutual background in the military. Many doctors and nurses have military backgrounds ( as I do myself) so the concept of decisive action and command and control was innate. Some of the military concepts were beneficial, some detrimental, but as we in the UK remain at war the relationship to the military remains strong. The wild card in healthcare is the religious background with nursing. Hardly a week goes by without the Nursing Times commenting on the vocation (or calling) versus the professional attitude.
With reference to lives saved, In the last 5 years the most important development in both cancer care and other life threatening conditions has not been a new drug or scanner but the low key development of a MDT - a MultiDisciplinary Team. Its a clinical review of a case where everyone with an interest in that case has an equal input. This means that specialist nurses, radiologists, pathologists and surgeons meet to discuss and mutually agree the best path for the patient. Inititally this was viewed with much suspicion and was expected to degenerate into an argument with the surgeon taking the final say as he wields the knife. It depended on the focus as the patient first, ego second, as I imagine that a safe landing is more important than a captain's ego. As the teams matured, they produced coherent and pragmatic treatment plans, with magnificent results. We cannot match the French in cancer survival rates but part of that is the way we keep statistics and partly because the French have a far superior screening programme.
Ive used much of the terminology from aviation in improvement programmes for healthcare. MEL is one. Having the staff define what they absolutely need prior to an OR case was a very big step forward. Go\no go decisions was also very important. I can cite many examples of where a junior and inexperienced member of staff halted a procedure early (ie before it went pear shaped) because the go\no go decisions had been outlined.
Your comment about questioning medical opinion made me smile. It is largely a welcome development as it involves the patient in their own decisions for treatment. The thorn in the side is the media. They get so much wrong its astounding. Take MRSA - the superbug. Its widely described in the media as a hospital acquired infection (HAI). The facts are that if you swabbed the nostrils of every passenger on a 100 seat aircraft 20-30 would have MRSA bacteria positive. The reasons why we all dont get ill are complex but some facts about HAI is that a person turns up at hospital not well and we do tests and detect MRSA infection. They most probably acquired the infection in the community but as we discovered the cause, the hospital gets the statistic for MRSA infection.
I had an entertaining discussion with a surgeon today and the subject of airline\healthcare parallels came up. The discussion involved a very insightful comment from her - an aircraft takes off in a definable condition. A patient may turn up at hospital in a desperate state, and requires definitive and urgent attention. The surgeon described this situation in aviation terms as a pilot materialising in the captain's seat with an aircraft in severe difficulty and on its way to crash unless interventions were made. The surgeon has a PPL by the way.
PJ2 and others.. thanks for the posts. We have much to share.