What do a Formula-One car racing team and a hospital have in common? Not much, you might say. After all, the excitement and thrill of cars racing at 220 miles per hour with engines revving up to 18,000 rpm in front of thousands of fans are miles away from quiet and fluorescent-lit hospital rooms. However, researchers in Britain have found ways that patient handovers in hospitals can learn from pit stops in car racing!

First of all, what are patient handovers? Handovers are defined as

"the transfer of professional responsibility and accountability for some or all aspects of care for a patient or group of patients to another person or professional group on a temporary or permanent basis."

For example, after surgery, a patient is "handed-over" from the Operating Room (OR) or Recovery Room staff to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) staff.

In any handover, the primary intention is on the accurate transfer of information about the patient's state and care plan, to ensure the safety and continuity of patient care. However, handover failures have been identified as a significant source of medical failures and account for 20% of malpractice claims in the United States. It is reported that "communication failures" were the root cause in 70% of medical errors, of which 50% were because of communication breakdowns during handovers.

To address these communication failures, surgeons at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London got inspiration from an unlikely source: the pit-stop techniques of the Italian racing team Ferrari. They realized that pit stops where a 20-member team works on changing tires, filling up the fuel tank, cleaning the air vents and making other adjustments in less than seven seconds can have valuable implications for patient handoffs. The process seemed similar to the team effort of surgeons, anesthesiologists, and ICU staff transferring a patient, the corresponding equipment and the relevant information safely and quickly from the OR to the ICU. So for the last few years, they have established a learning collaboration with the Ferrari team.

In the Ferrari crew, each member is required to do a specific job, in a specific sequence, and in total silence. A "lollipop man" with a paddle signals to the car to come in and when it is safe to go. In the hospital team, however, things are typically very chaotic. Doctors and nurses talk to each other at the same time, equipment is connected and reconnected in no particular order, and no one is in charge of the whole process.

As a result of implementing lessons from the Ferrari team, patient safety has dramatically improved, while length of the handover has been reduced. For example, the mean number of technical errors was reduced from 5.42 to 3.15, the mean number of information handover omissions was reduced from 2.09 to 1.07, and duration of handover was reduced from 10.8 minutes to 9.4 minutes. Prior to the new practices, 39% of patients had more than one error in both technical and information handover prior to the new protocol, compared with only 11.5% with the new handover.

While a hospital stay will never be as exciting as going to the race track, it is good to know that new approaches from car racing are now being implemented in hospitals to reduce errors and improve safety.