[Critical incidents]

In medicine real severe mishaps are rare. On the other hand critical incidents are frequent. Anonymous critical incident reporting systems allow us to learn from these mishaps. This learning process will make our daily clinical work safer Unfortunately, before these systems can be used efficiently our professional culture has to be changed. Everyone in medicine has to admit that errors do occur to see the need for an open discussion. If we really want to learn from errors, we cannot punish the individual, who reported his or her mistake. The interest is primarily in what has happened and why it has happened and not who has committed this mistake. The cause for critical incidents in medicine is in over 80% the human factor Poor communication, work under enormous stress, conflicts and hierarchies are the main cause. This has been known for many years, therefore have already 15 years ago high-tech industries, like e.g. aviation, started to invest in special courses on team training. Medicine is a typical profession were until now only the individual performance decided about the professional career Communication, conflict management, stress management, decision making, risk management, team and team resource management were subjects that have never been taught during our preor postgraduate education. These points are the most important ones for an optimal teamwork. A multimodular course designed together with Swissair (Human Aspect Development medical, HADmedical) helps to cover, as in aviation, the soft factor and behavioural education in medicine and to prepare professionals in health care to work as a real team.