Daily Health News   >Oil and Water: What hospitals Can Learn From BP Oil Spill Disaster

Oil and Water: What hospitals Can Learn From BP Oil Spill Disaster

by Medsphere - Posted May 12, 2010 7:04 AM

Oil and healthcare have more in common than one would think. A systemic approach to safety is critical in both industries and both have players who've turned tragic mistakes into lessons learned.

A good example was Bridge Medical, a software company with a BCMA-type barcoding system that earned love in the patient safety community for a documentary where clinicians bared all regarding serious medical errors they had made. The point of "Beyond Blame" was to show how these professionals dealt with their errors--how they came clean, so to speak, with the patients' families, and what they did to move forward and prevent future errors. Some later became known in the patient safety community for their leadership.

As Jad Mouawad reports in The New York Times (May 9, 2010), Exxon Mobil has managed a somewhat similar turnaround:

"The industry standard for safety, analysts say, is set by Exxon Mobil, which displays an obsessive attention to detail, monitors the smallest spill and imposes scripted procedures on managers.

"Before drilling a well, for example, it runs elaborate computer models to test beforehand what the drillers might encounter. The company trains contractors to recognize risky behavior and asks employees for suggestions on how to improve safety. It says it has cut time lost to safety incidents by 12 percent each year since 2000.

"Analysts credit that focus, in part, to the aftermath of the 1989 Exxon Valdez grounding, which spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska.

“'Whatever you think of them, Exxon is now the safest oil company there is,' said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy expert at Rice University."

BP is a different story, say experts. "'BP has systemic safety and health problems,' said Jordan Barab, the deputy assistant secretary of labor for OSHA. 'They need to take their intentions and apply them much more effectively on the ground, where the hazards actually lie.'

"Some analysts say the safety problems indicate that BP has not yet reined in the culture of risk that prevailed under Mr. Hayward’s predecessor, John Browne, who transformed BP from a sleepy British oil producer into one of the world’s top explorers through the acquisitions of Amoco and Atlantic Richfield."

We can only hope BP will learn from their mistakes but at what cost? Too bad they couldn't learn from Exxon Mobil's.