SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

Nurse touts airline safety practices

Associated Press

MEMPHIS - When Gary L. Sculli left his job to return to his earlier career, nursing, he experienced a culture shock. The airlines have created a culture that promotes safety, but the health care industry is far behind, he said.

Now, Sculli travels around the counrty telling health care workers how to use aviation safety concepts tp prevent medication errors and other slip-ups from injuring or killing patients.

The young 43-years-old promotes a philosophy adopted from his own experience. He wsays health care workers must learn to catch mistakes or reduce harm once errors have happened, because eliminating them is impossible. Whenever humans are functioning, wherever humans are interacting and working, there always will be errors," said Sculli.

When he's not appearing as a paid consultant or unpaid speaker, he's applying aviation safety practices at his current job as a nurse manager of a 40-bed unit at Baptist Memorial Hospital-Memphis. Schulli's background is a big asset to his colleagues in the hospital and throughtout the Baptist system, said Beverly Jordan, the system's vice president and chief nursing officer.

Nursees in Sculli's unit are now using checklists, an airline staple. One checklist used in shift-change meetings reminds on staff about factors that can lead to errors, such as patients with similar names. Sculli is unusual because he has worked both as a pilot and as a nurse. But his interest in bringing aviation safety practices into health care is commom. LifeWings Partners LLC, a Memphis consulting company, pursues the same goal.

Health care workers want to imitate commercial aviation because it's extremely safe: No one died in a commercial airline accident in the United states in 2007. By contrast, a 1999 report by the Institute of Medical estimate that medical errors kill between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans each year.

 

 

info@MyStateTENNESSEE.com