• Luke Yip and Brenna Farmer.
• Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center, Denver Health, 777 Bannock Street, MC 0180, Denver, CO, 80204-4507, USA, medicaltoxicology@gmail.com.
• J Med Toxicol. 2015 Jun 1; 11 (2): 257-61.

AbstractHigh reliability organizations (HROs), such as the aviation industry, successfully engage in high-risk endeavors and have low incidence of adverse events. HROs have a preoccupation with failure and errors. They analyze each event to effect system wide change in an attempt to mitigate the occurrence of similar errors. The healthcare industry can adapt HRO practices, specifically with regard to teamwork and communication. Crew resource management concepts can be adapted to healthcare with the use of certain tools such as checklists and the sterile cockpit to reduce medication errors. HROs also use The Swiss Cheese Model to evaluate risk and look for vulnerabilities in multiple protective barriers, instead of focusing on one failure. This model can be used in medication safety to evaluate medication management in addition to using the teamwork and communication tools of HROs.

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