SURGICAL SAFETY INSTITUTE, LLC
TAMPA, FLORIDA

Surgical Safety Institute Nominated For Emerging Technology Company of the Year award by the TBTF We launched the Surgical Safety Institute in 2004 because we knew operating rooms could also be safer. Surgical Safety Institute is based on the premise that bright, hard working, altruistic individuals who have chosen the surgical world for their life's work are highly motivated to minimize error, detect errors when they occur and fix those errors. The current medical culture of blame and shame has done little to reduce error. In fact, it is estimated that 50,000 to 100,000 lives a year are cut short by medical mishap and that half of these deaths involve a hospital-based surgical experience. Surgical Safety Institute addresses the disparity between good intentions and unfortunate outcomes. A growing number of health care providers are trying to learn from aviation accidents and, more specifically, from what the airlines have done to prevent them. In the last five years, several major hospitals have hired professional pilots to train their critical-care staff members on how to apply aviation safety principles to their work. Spurred by a 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academies, titled "To Err Is Human," which estimated that as many as 98,000 patients die annually from preventable medical errors, and by more recent bad publicity from mistakes like amputations of the wrong limbs, many health care providers are redoubling their efforts to improve patient safety. "We're where the airline industry was 30 years ago" when a series of fatal mistakes increased scrutiny and provoked change, said Dr. Stephen B. Smith, chief medical officer at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, the teaching hospital for the University of Nebraska. It is well established that, like airplane crashes, the majority of adverse events in health care are the result of human error, particularly failures in communication, leadership and decision-making. With these endorsements, and with the airline industry cutting salaries, benefits and flight time, many pilots have become part-time health care consultants. For fees that range from $7,000 to $40,000, they offer training and help devise and put in place systemwide safety protocols and procedures. Among the growing number of health care institutions that have hired aviation consultants or adopted aviation safety practices in the last five years are Vanderbilt University Medical Center; Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions; Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles; Vassar Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.; the University of Nebraska; and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. The definition of an error in health care, Professor Helmreich said, is "fuzzier" than in aviation, where it is easier to identify a "foul-up" and who was responsible. Health care providers' fear of litigation and losing their medical licenses also hinders the honest reporting of mistakes, whereas aviators are often inoculated against punishment if they promptly report incidents to the authorities. Training programs developed by pilots without knowledge of health care realities can be "appallingly bad," he said. More successful are programs developed by consulting firms like LifeWings in Memphis and the Surgical Safety Institute in Tampa, Fla., both of which have professional pilots and physicians developing their training materials and serving on their advisory boards. Some institutions, like Johns Hopkins, have created their own in-house training programs and safety structures based on aviation. "Aviation provided us with the ideas, which we then modified for health care as well as our particular situation," said Dr. Peter Pronovost, the director of the Center of Innovation in Quality Patient Care at Johns Hopkins. Employees who work at hospitals that have adopted these kinds of aviation-based safety programs are mostly enthusiastic. Many say they are more confident doing their jobs thanks to posted checklists, which, for example, include reminders to wash their hands, confirm the identity of the patient and check for drug allergies. They appreciate the fact that they are now not only encouraged to speak up if they are concerned about something, but also required to do so. Surgical Safety Institute Nominated For Emerging Technology Company of the Year award by the TBTF We launched the Surgical Safety Institute in 2004 because we knew operating rooms could also be safer. Surgical Safety Institute is based on the premise that bright, hard working, altruistic individuals who have chosen the surgical world for their life's work are highly motivated to minimize error, detect errors when they occur and fix those errors. The current medical culture of blame and shame has done little to reduce error. In fact, it is estimated that 50,000 to 100,000 lives a year are cut short by medical mishap and that half of these deaths involve a hospital-based surgical experience. Surgical Safety Institute addresses the disparity between good intentions and unfortunate outcomes. Surgical Safety Institute Nominated For Emerging Technology Company of the Year award by the TBTF We launched the Surgical Safety Institute in 2004 because we knew operating rooms could also be safer. Surgical Safety Institute is based on the premise that bright, hard working, altruistic individuals who have chosen the surgical world for their life's work are highly motivated to minimize error, detect errors when they occur and fix those errors. The current medical culture of blame and shame has done little to reduce error. In fact, it is estimated that 50,000 to 100,000 lives a year are cut short by medical mishap and that half of these deaths involve a hospital-based surgical experience. Surgical Safety Institute addresses the disparity between good intentions and unfortunate outcomes.