Nurse touts airline safety practices
Former pilot boosts health care safety with experience
DANIEL CONNOLLY The Commercial Appeal
Sunday, June 1, 2008
MEMPHIS - When Gary L. Sculli left his job as a Northwest Airlines pilot to return to his earlier career, nursing, he experienced a culture shock.
The airlines have created a culture that promotes safety, but the health care industry is far behind, he said.
Now, Sculli travels around the country telling health care workers how to use aviation safety concepts to prevent medication errors and other slip-ups from injuring or killing patients.
The 43-year-old with close-cropped gray hair promotes a philosophy adopted from his own experience. He says health care workers must learn to catch mistakes or reduce harm once errors have happened, because eliminating them is impossible.
"Wherever humans are functioning, wherever humans are interacting and working, there always will be errors," said Sculli.
When he's not appearing as a paid consultant or unpaid speaker, he's applying aviation safety practices at his current job as nurse manager of a 40-bed unit at Baptist Memorial Hospital-Memphis.
Sculli's background is a big asset to his colleagues in the hospital and throughout the Baptist system, said Beverly Jordan, the system's vice president and chief nursing officer.
Nurses in Sculli's unit are now using checklists, an airline staple. One checklist used in shift-change meetings reminds the head nurse to tell everyone on staff about factors that can lead to errors, such as patients with similar names.
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