Patient safety and rocket science

‘This safety stuff, it's not rocket science’. Many readers of this journal will undoubtedly have heard this sentiment expressed by their clinical colleagues. The article by Kemper et al1 shows just how widely this impression of patient safety misses the mark. This high-quality study confirms the trend of the recent literature by finding that teamwork training using the civil aviation Crew Resource Management (CRM) approach has no evident clinical benefit, although it does seem to change attitudes and enhance some aspects of the ‘non-technical’ skills involved with interacting with colleagues. In doing so, the study highlights three areas of complexity and challenge in the development and evaluation of safety interventions. First, the interventions themselves are deceptively complex; as recommended by experts, they are grounded in theory,2 but may be entirely wrong. Second, the success of even ‘simple’ interventions like the WHO checklist hugely depends on...
Source: Quality and Safety in Health Care - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: BMJQS Noteworthy articles Editorials Source Type: research