People assume and expect medical and dental facilities to be well-organized and a safe place for patients. Indeed, physicians and dentists do their best to deliver quality health care to patients. Their expertise and training are key to complex and vital operations and procedures that help save lives and preserve oral health. In spite of all these efforts, there are incidents or instances where technical or human error lead to bad results.
Dental practitioners developed ways to lessen these incidents; but one field have had decades of experience and addressed the same type of problems to eliminate errors done by both their crew and the machines. The aviation industry has developed the crew resource management to address the human aspect of flight incidents. Early accidents like plane crashes made the industry adopt the systematic way of addressing the human errors to avoid adverse effects. This swift effort of airlines decimated tremendous amount of accidents caused by human error which is efficient. This explains how fundamentals of crew resource management influenced the dental setting. There are principles in the CRM that dentists can apply and incorporate in their daily practice to avoid mishaps and treatment errors.
By definition, Crew resource management is making use of all the available resources like information, equipment, and people to achieve efficient flight operations. Like mentioned earlier, dentistry and flying planes are in the same sense because they are highly technical jobs that demand a high level of expertise and training to perfect. The aviation industry developed this method upon discovering that plane accidents are affected by human error; and not one person is directly responsible as many aspects of adverse human failures contribute to creating problems resulting to plane accidents and crashes. The chain of individual mistakes of crew members are the source of plane crashes which made them create a systematic way of building and encouraging crew members to speaking up. This points out errors of other members before and after any flight. In the dental office or medical field, the dentist or health practitioner cannot be singled out as the one to blame for failures in treatments or operations. Technical errors exist due to an individual’s capability and skill.
CRM works by making every successful flight based on team effort and enhancing their individual skills to benefit the group or team’s efficiency in providing secure flights. People involved in the dental office can apply this principle by processing information of patients, making sure that all the equipment work properly. All the team members or personnel involved in this procedure have the responsibility of making this undertaking work. This also needs the full cooperation of the dentist and members.
Dentists are yet to fully and systematically apply CRM in their dental offices. The effects of a solid foundation in the members of a dental team can result to more successful procedures and treatments and patient satisfaction rate.