Crew Resources Management: The Flight Plan for Lasting Change in Patient Safety Book

Crew Resource Management: The Flightplan for Lasting Change in Patient Safety teaches you to train your staff in the CRM methodology, while providing all the safety tools necessary for implementation. This comprehensive, plain-English resource is an incredible value! The CRM model was founded to decrease negative outcomes in the airline industry—and has been used successfully in a variety of sectors such as nuclear powered submarines, nuclear power plants, chemical manufacturing plants, and seaborne commercial shipping lines. Our unique team of aviation and healthcare expert authors—F. Andrew Gaffney, MD, Rhea Seddon, MD, and Captain Stephen W. Harding—will help your organization increase patient safety and turnaround time, improve communication within staff and among departments, gain leadership buy-in, and decrease negative outcomes and achieve overall improvement.

Doody Review Services

Reviewer:Paul H. Keckley, PhD(Vanderbilt University Medical Center)
Description:The authors bring a perspective to healthcare that's needed -- the notion that indeed "we" can learn from other industries about ways to improve safety and performance. The analogy to the airline industry is timely and thought-provoking.
Purpose:This book provides a basic overview of considerations necessary for an organization to structure its clinical processes around care teams and processes that reduce error and improve care. It suggests a top-down commitment in tandem with a bottom-up model that could be easily implemented in healthcare organizations of any size or technologic capability.
Audience:This is useful as an overview of team-based care management processes. Though it lacks adequate outcome data upon which the "proof" of its model is demonstrated, it is nonetheless worthwhile reading. The authors are highly credible and do a good job in laying out the basic tenets of team-based care management.
Features:The format is highly attractive: basic concepts of crew management followed by steps toward implementation. It does not require in-depth understanding of operations nor a commitment to technologies for process management. Lacking are specific tools or case studies where all aspects of a crew management model are illustrated in-depth, i.e., it would be helpful to apply the model to "stat x-ray" support or to a patient care unit prone to lapses. The illustrations are brief and do not lend to understanding the full scope of policies, procedures, and results from crew resource management implementation. The book also lacks an index -- a gap to be remedied in subsequent editions.
Assessment:This is a great resource adaptable to any provider organization regardless of technologic sophistication or program focus. While it lacks an index and the print production quality is suboptimal, it provides a helpful overview of an important topic in a credible, helpful, and easily-comprehensible way.