LifeWings^® Healthcare Speakers

Excerpts About LifeWings and Steve Harden From Major Media Outlets

From Hospital safety takes page out of Top Gun manual, chicagotribune.com, 2/12/08

"Six months after Provena employed the LifeWings method, miscommunication reports are down 50 percent, Cappelletti reported.

LifeWings President Stephen Harden, a former Top Gun flight instructor, co-founded the company in 2005 because, he said, "aviation and medicine both rely on teamwork for efficiency and safety.

"Some consider medicine an art, where Dr. A does it this way and Dr. B does it this way. But then the rest of the staff doesn't know what to expect." The LifeWings method is especially helpful, Cappelletti said, when her department has shift changes or when a patient is moved from one area to another, such as from an operating to a recovery room.

"Bottom line, we want to reduce errors," she said. "Everyone has been on board with this program because it helps us do that."
 

From Group Of Top Gun Pilots & Astronauts Improving Hospital Safety in Memphis, ABCNews 24, 6/28/07

Pilots and astronauts can't afford to make a single mistake. Steve Harden is a former Navy Top Gun pilot. He said, “The consequences for mistakes in aviation are very serious, aviation is an unforgiving business, if you make a serious mistake it can cost you your life.”

He teamed up with two former astronauts to use the lessons they learned in the air in hospitals right here in the Mid-South. The group teaches doctors and nurses to use precise checklists to reduce or eliminate mistakes. Harden said, “I've never made a take-off without doing a before take-off checklist, and the same concept applies to say a surgical procedure. Is it the right patient? Are you doing the procedure on the right part of the body? Do you have all of the equipment you need? Is it ready to go? Many of our clients have hired us for exactly those kinds of problems. They've either had near misses, or have in fact operated on the wrong part of the body or God forbid, have operated on the wrong patient. That does occasionally happen.”

It may sound hard to believe that a simple checklist can prevent such a horrible mistake, but Harden said the training has saved lives in at least one Memphis hospital, “Approximately 200 patients in the past two years have walked out of their hospital that wouldn't have walked out of their hospital without this program.”
 

From Preventing Medical Mistakes, Medical Breakthroughs, 1/11/08
"Steve Harden, pilot and founder/CEO of the for-profit company, called Lifewings Partners, says the same principles that keep pilots and their passengers safe in the air can be used to prevent mistakes and improve safety in hospitals and other medical facilities. “We’re in it for patient safety,” says Harden, who adds that, to date, more than 70 medical facilities have used their services.

Lifewings has a five-step program that involves changing the hospital procedures and communication issues that can lead to mistakes, training physicians and nurses to work better as a team, also setting up checklists for standard operating procedures and measurements to track outcomes.  Harden cites a hospital in the Southeastern U.S. that went from having a “wrong surgery” once every 60 days, to a track record that logged more than 600 days without a single such incident.

“Health care is more safety and quality conscious than it’s ever been,” Harden says. “As long as health care is growing and more people are using it, the chance for mistakes will continue to increase, unless some fairly fundamental changes are made in how the health care teams work together.”