(no title)
meew0 | 10 months ago
It's definitely widely used in Germany, where I work. I don't know how common it is in the US, though.
I often think about what makes medicine so different from aviation and your other examples, culture-wise. It's not like there's no safety culture at all in medicine, but clearly these kinds of structures are deployed to a much lower extent.
One major reason might be the far larger diversity of possible situations in medicine. It's possible to make a checklist for surgical safety because every surgery is similar, same to how every plane flight is similar. But if I think about, for example, harm due to adverse effects from medications, or missed abnormal values in blood tests, it feels very difficult to create a checklist to prevent those that would be specific enough to be useful, but also general enough to capture all important situations these might arise in.
In this sense, I think certain “low-hanging fruit” of safety culture improvements have already been captured in medicine. Apart from surgical safety, I can think of check lists for chemotherapy administration, for blood transfusions, for management of a severe allergic reaction, and other specific individual things. Pointing and vocalizing is also done in surgery, albeit in a less formal way. “Two sets of eyes” policies exist in e.g. pathology for more certainty in diagnosis of cancer.
Nevertheless there is clearly room to improve, as evidenced by the continuing occurrence of “never events” such as retained foreign bodies in surgery. There are certainly economic factors at play here as well: unlike in the free market, in the medical system there is often very little economic incentive for quality, and the same principle I mentioned before — of the immense diversity of possible situations — makes top-down regulation very tricky.
Maybe part of it is also that the potential harm from a retained foreign body is much lower than the potential harm from a plane crash. And maybe medical care is so much more common than plane flights that by base rate alone, mistakes in the former will be much more common. Yet I still think there is much that can be done, and I am unsure what exactly is preventing that from happening.
eastbound|10 months ago
Yes but the major is the number of deaths. An incompetent surgeon can kill at most one person at a time. Besides, variance in surgery is much higher than in aviation.
D-Coder|10 months ago