The principles that ensure flight safety can be adopted in medicine. Experts came to the conclusion that when performing complex and dangerous work, the best result is the maximum standardization of all procedures.
There are professions where the cost of a mistake is high. Therefore, all work procedures and their sequence in such cases are usually as standardized as possible. On the one hand, this is highly likely to guarantee the desired result, on the other hand, it protects people and companies from legal consequences in case of failure, says American psychologist Amy Bucher. In addition, strictly scheduled regulations help to quickly notice that something went wrong and take steps to correct the situation.
- The main mistake on the way to professional self-realization
Let’s take aviation, for example. In Skyfaring: A Journey With A Pilot, aviator Mark Vanhoenacker writes: “The interaction and coordination of actions between the commander and the co-pilot are strictly formalized. Not only the tasks that they perform, but also the words that accompany the actions are set to the smallest detail. Our interaction and our tasks are clearly distributed.”
Because the tasks are so clearly defined, pilots will quickly notice if something goes wrong. Aviation remains one of the safest modes of transport, not least due to the formalization of all procedures. If you doubt this after the news of another crash, do not forget that plane crashes make world news precisely because they happen so rarely.
“I first heard of such coordination when I enrolled in a Carl Wake graduate course at the University of Michigan. He wrote an article titled “Collective Intelligence in Organizations. Fine-Tuned Collaboration on the Deck of an Aircraft Carrier” about the teams working on the decks of aircraft carriers and managing the takeoff and landing of aircraft, writes Amy Bacher. Carl Wake calls these teams «highly trusted organizations.» There is a very high risk of error in their work, and the actions of all members of the aircraft carrier’s crew must be coordinated as much as possible. This is achieved through a very strict and detailed set of standard procedures. Each of them at any given time imagines what his partners are doing now. If something goes wrong, they, like civilian pilots, will instantly understand it, because standard procedures will be violated.
- Decision fatigue
The standardization of all procedures for performing complex and dangerous work has led to such success that now, apparently, surgeons will also adopt such methods. The famous surgeon and writer Atul Gawande published the book “Checklist. How to avoid stupid mistakes leading to fatal consequences1, where he proves that standardization of procedures is also necessary in medical practice. The book made a huge impression on the medical community. Its publication coincided with the health care reform in the United States, in which much attention was paid to the prevention of medical errors. And it is very likely that in the next decade, American hospitals will resemble cockpits in terms of the severity of their regulations. After all, the formalization of the workflow allows you to recognize the error as early as possible and take measures to eliminate it. The sooner we discover it, the more opportunities we have to fix it.
See Amy Bucher’s blog at amybucherphd.com for more details.
1 Russian translation: «Alpina Publisher», 2014.