Checking the checklists: hospitals are not airplanes

Whilst it is obvious that medicine is not aviation, and that they have many differences, they also share many commonalities. Including the fact that the practice of aviation, like medicine is both art and science.

The political placement of aviation on a pedestal for medicine to admire and mimic is potentially injuring the specialty of human factors. The cookbook approach to checklists, the confusion of CRM (crew resource management) with the wider science of HFE (human factors ergonomics), along with shifting of responsibility to the individual for systems error is everything that human factors is not. Idealizing aviation may make medical professionals defensive, and rightly so, as they state that hospitals and people are not airplanes.