What a hospital learned from a Formula One team

Metaphorical thinking at its finest – what a hospital learned from a Formula One pit crew.

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children identified a major pain point in its procedures – the moment when heart disease patients are transferred from the operating room to the intensive care unit.  That journey carried high risk, with a significant rate of mortality.

Two hospital physicians happened to be racing fans and noticed the parallels between that handoff and the procedure a race team goes through when a car pulls into the pits for routine maintenance – which is done safely but also at lightning speed.

The hospital collaborated with the pit crews of the McLaren and Ferrari F1 teams to get some ideas. They observed those pit crews in action, and also sent videos of the hospital transfer procedure to Ferrari’s head of technical operations for analysis. Although that guy knew nothing about cardiac surgery, what struck him is how chaotic everything was in comparison to the discipline exhibited by his pit crews.

Based on Ferrari’s feedback, the hospital created a role analogous to that of a pit crew’s lollipop man – the person who waves the driver in and coordinates the pitstop. Prior to that change, no single person had been in charge of the handoff. They also noticed that F1 pit crews operate in complete silence, quite different from the cacophony of voices that one hears during the transfer to the ICU.  People talking leads to chaos, which leads to mistakes. So, the new procedures required silence during that transfer.

As a result of these changes, the number of technical errors dropped by 42%.