Adaptation of airline crew resource management principles to dentistry

The aviation industry uses crew resource management (CRM) to address the human aspect of error. Dentistry can incorporate these concepts to reduce dental error. The authors provide a checklist to help clinicians mitigate error.

Health care systems have begun to focus on medical error. During the past 30 years, the airline industry has developed mitigation strategies that are being adapted for medicine. CRM involves the use of information, equipment and people to increase safety by targeting early identification of errors.

To enhance safety, practitioners must implement forward-thinking strategies. Because human error is inevitable, threat and error management (TEM) techniques are needed to help identify and trap error before it develops into unexpected outcomes. Risk analysis increases situational awareness (SA) of potential dental error. Efficiency increases with early error detection.

The authors provide a dental checklist that is divided into "appointment review," "before procedure," "procedure," "before dismissal" and "after dismissal" to organize dental activities in a manner that enhances error detection.

The dental checklist is a tool to incorporate CRM and TEM techniques into the dental care environment to increase SA, safety and efficiency.