Military rather than civil aviation holds the answers for safer healthcare

Medicine has adopted several safety principles from civil aviation with mixed success. Examples include regulatory processes such as accreditation1 and incident reporting2 and standardisation techniques such as checklists3; the so called sterile cockpit, which forbids non-essential activity4; and handover briefings.5 Although treatment guidelines may benefit from standardisation, and regulation can improve the safety of medical devices and drugs, other areas, such as emergency departments and intensive care units, need to maintain flexibility to cope with developing situations. Translating rigid civil aviation processes indiscriminately into hospitals is not always appropriate.

A better industry to consider for healthcare functions that require flexibility and autonomy is not civil but military aviation. Civil aviation has zero tolerance for risk and …