STEaPP Seminar Series - Risky Business: Learning from Other Life-Critical Organisations

In the face of pressure to innovate at an ever faster pace, Dr Kevin Fong explores what modern medicine can learn from other 'risky' industries in order to improve patient safety, and the lessons it may have overlooked in the past.

In the twentieth century, we very rapidly pushed back the frontiers of science, medicine and exploration with the fruits of the technological revolution. A raft of high-risk, high-reliability industries grew up in parallel - among them commercial aviation, motor transport, space exploration and modern warfare. Each of these was forced to evolve its own approach to risk mitigation and management. More recently, we have begun to look across the boundaries between these life-critical industries for lessons that we might learn from one another. In recent years, modern medicine in particular has been singled out for its apparent failings in the field of patient safety. In response, medicine has been keen to draw down lessons from the experience of others, looking to the world of aviation in particular. But there are pitfalls in this approach and, without proper exploration, many of the most valuable lessons are at risk of being lost in translation.  

In this STEaPP Seminar, Kevin Fong will discuss the success and failure of medicine to learn from other life-critical organisations and why learning the right lessons from the 'right stuff' is harder than it looks.

Dr Kevin Fong

Dr Kevin Fong is Consultant Anaesthetist at UCL Hospitals, and is Anaesthetic Lead for both the Patient Emergency Response Team and Major Incident Planning. He is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in Physiology at University College London where he organises and runs an undergraduate course Extreme Environment Physiology.  He studied astrophysics and medicine at University College London, and completed postgraduate clinical training in Anaesthesia and Critical Care Medicine.  He has a long standing interest in human space exploration and space medicine and has worked with NASA's Human Adaptation and Countermeasures Office at Johnson Space Centre in Houston.  Kevin is founder and associate director of the Centre for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine at University College London.

Event details

• Date: 17 May 2017
• Time: 15.30-17.00
• Location: Engineering Front Executive Suite 103

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STEaPP Seminar Series

The STEaPP Seminar Series aims to share knowledge from within UCL STEaPP, and from across and outside UCL that is particularly relevant to UCL STEaPP research and teaching communities. 

We aim to showcase speakers across a variety of fields, and from both academic research and practice. The series is a platform for connecting with key figures in research and practice, stimulating research discussion, developing collaborations, improving education practice and linking education to research.  

For details of future STEaPP departmental seminars please contact Dr Carolin Kaltofen.

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