How to harness all your resources

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The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 279 No 7479 p593-596
24 November 2007

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Continuing professional development

How to harness all your resources

The airline industry has been described as the safest industry in the world. It was one of the first to adopt a system of error reporting, which was later taken up by pharmacy. In this article, Chris Seal describes another aviation practice that may be useful to pharmacists

Continuing professional development articles

Chris Seal, BPharm, MRPharmS, worked in community pharmacy before joining the Royal Air Force as a pilot in 1987. He later became an RAF CRM instructor and has been accredited by the Civilian Aviation Authority.

He left the RAF in 2005 to fly from Bristol Airport for easyJet but also runs a CRM consultancy company.

Correspondence to:
flipseal@hotmail.com

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Airplane crew

SUMMARY

Most early aviation accidents were attributed to mechanical and structural problems but as engineering science progressed, most accidents became attributable to human error

Following a number of high profile accidents in the 1970s and 80s, focus was put on why crews occasionally made poor decisions and mistakes. It was noted that, although most pilots were skilful aviators, some did not get the best out of their crews.

In fact, some captains were so uncompromising that crews would not intervene, even when the captain made obvious and preventable mistakes.

As a result, “crew resource management” (CRM) was developed

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