Why Hospitals Should Fly: The Ultimate Flight Plan to Patient Safety and Quality Care

As many of you know, hospitals and healthcare in general seem to always use the excuse that the entire field is so different, unique, complex and special that it cannot learn or apply lessons and methods from other industries! Poppy cock! Nance makes the case clear with a perfect example of aerospace as a model for safety and communication. Reading this book caused me to imagine other fields and lessons for healthcare. For example, how about logistics experts from auto manufacturing plants who could teach hospitals how to better manage supplies and keep waste down? How about shipping/receiving (UPS, Fedex...) as models for scheduling and tracking? How about ANY successful company in customer service and making people feel welcome, let alone trusting? I have the impression this book is not widely read. It's too bad. It is a quick read, the lessons and ideas are crystal clear.

The best book I hve ever read, fiction or nonfiction. It makes you want to ask your hospital CEO, "have you read this book" and why aren't we doing it yet.

I wanted to take a moment to reflect that this book "Why hospitals should fly", along with another "Ending Nurse-to-Nurse Hostility: Why Nurses Eat Their Young and Each Other" are perhaps the key tools aside from the human factor approach, that have stirred enthusiasm and created impetus for our organization to change its ways. We as a hospital have suffered from errors in the past, and what hospital hasn't. However with a wonderful week of seminars and guidance from the authors, we are reaching out to our employees to empower them to foster the changes necessary to bring an end to errors due to communication, increase teamwork, espirit de corps and generally allow the organization to learn. Thanks to John and Kathleen..........Brilliant.....

I just finished this book today and highly recommend it to anyone interested in knowing more about medicine, hospitals, and patient care. Doctors have been under fire from many different groups to perform the impossible -- save everyone and do it cheaply. Doctors, HMO's, lawyers, patients, and government each have a hand in the state of our health care system. This book outlines a sound approach to helping medicine achieve a better safety record and ultimately, better patient outcomes. This is a must read for any medical professional or interested party and I would love to see St. Michaels in my neighborhood. Well done -- and long overdue. Aviation safety has many things to teach us -- can we implement these ideas? Or maybe the question is, "Can we afford not to?"