News & Events

Beyond the Checklist: Protecting Patient Safety with Suzanne Gordon

Time & Location: The Cornell Club, 6 East 44th Street (between Madison and Fifth) in Manhattan from 6:30pm to 9:00pm

The U.S. healthcare system is now spending many millions of dollars to improve "patient safety" and "inter-professional practice." Nevertheless, an estimated 100,000 patients still succumb to preventable medical errors or infections every year. How can health care providers reduce the terrible financial and human toll of medical errors and injuries that harm rather than heal?

Join us as author Suzanne Gordon argues that lives could be saved and patient care enhanced by adapting the relevant lessons of aviation safety and teamwork. In response to a series of human-error caused crashes, the airline industry developed the system of job training and information sharing known as Crew Resource Management (CRM). Under the new industry-wide system of CRM, pilots, flight attendants, and ground crews now communicate and cooperate in ways that have greatly reduced the hazards of commercial air travel. Drawing on the experience of doctors, nurses, medical educators, and administrators, this book demonstrates how CRM can be adapted, more widely and effectively, to health care delivery.

Suzanne Gordon is an award-winning journalist and author. She has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly, the American Prospect, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, JAMA, The Annals of Internal Medicine, and others. She is the co-editor of the Culture and Politics of Healthcare Work series at Cornell University Press.

Suzanne is co-author with Patrick Mendenhall and medical educator Bonnie Blair O'Connor of Beyond the Checklist: What Else the Healthcare Industry Can Learn From Aviation Safety and Teamwork (2012, Cornell University Press).