The Article: Kaissi, A. (2012). “Learning” from other industries: Lessons and challenges for health care organizations. The Health Care Manager, 31(1): 65-74.
Big Idea: Health care learns from various industries including aviation, restaurants, retail chains, hotels, and even Disney. While health care adopts many ideas from others, it is unclear what benefit these innovative adoptions have as there is limited evidence. Kaissi explores the literature from 2000-2010 to see how much “learning” health care does or has done in the process of innovative adaptations, focusing on aviation, high-reliability organizations (HROs), telecommunication, entertainment, car racing, car manufacturing, and retail systems.
Survey Says!: The article author examines several industries and how the innovations from those industries diffused into health care, either through early adopters such as executives or national agencies such as the Institutes of Medicine encouraging the changes.
Quotable: “Management guru Peter Drucker described health care as the most difficult, chaotic, and complex industry to manage and suggested that the hospital is ‘altogether the most complex human organization ever devised [reference]'” (p. 65).
“Others have warned against the blind copying of aviation techniques by noting that ‘it is not sufficient to take aviation training materials and simply delete ‘pilot’ and replace with ‘nurse’ or ‘anesthetist’[reference]’’ (p.67).
So What?: This article is quite fascinating. I knew of many of the industry innovations health care has adopted, but there were a few examples, such as Formula One racing diffusing strategic handoffs within health care, that were new to me. It is interesting to see different businesses converging into health care as well as read the author’s points about the limited literature to support such continued practices.
Beth Boynton, RN, MS
March 16, 2012 8:23 pmMaybe we should blog about the similarities and differences between nursing/healthcare and aviation.
I think there are a lot of both. But I’m too tired to focus on it now, except to share one comment.
I learned a new term recently that comes from the investigation of the Challenger Launch and it is, “normalization of deviance”. Basically when we develop habits of doing things wrong to the extent that it is standard operating procedure. I think the transition from nursing school to nursing practice includes a LOT of these. Sometimes I feel like I can’t do things the way I’m supposed to so I try to do them as safe as I can under the circumstances.
Thanks for another great post,
Beth
Nursetopia
March 16, 2012 8:53 pmThanks, Beth! The article has a table that compares health care with other industries, like aviation. Pretty interesting, for sure.