Improving ICU handovers by learning from Scuderia Ferrari F1 team

https://healthmanagement.org/c/icu/IssueArticle/improving-handovers-by-learning-from-scuderia-ferrari

by embedding-shape • 3 months ago

66 56 3 months ago

healthmanagement.org

gadders3• 3 months ago

I clicked the button saying "I work in healthcare" to get access #L33T_H4XX0r

Insanity• 3 months ago

Yeah what a strange “guard” to put in place. No clue why they’d do it this way.

I first thought it’d be a “I’m 18+ pop-up” lol.

cucumber3732842• 3 months ago

It's probably underpinned by the same sort of "we're legally/contractually obligated to ask but we really don't care" type situation.

fwipsy• 3 months ago

My first thought was a conversation with a med student friend about the tension between medical research transparency and public policy. For example, it's good to get vaccinated, but some small fraction of people do have lasting side effects, and vaccine skeptics blow it out of proportion to support their views. So, medical professionals may be tempted to downplay vaccine injury to support public vaccination. Of course, doing so just erodes trust further if people notice. Anyways, perhaps this website is afraid people will hurt themselves with ambiguous information.

Angostura• 3 months ago

Generally medical websites do it in the UK, as a warning to sick people who Google their disease looking for advice and land on research papers or scary information for specialists

ButlerianJihad• 3 months ago

Now you're going to get ads for MRI systems and 10,000 miles of free bandage samples

gadders3• 3 months ago

"Claude, tell me how to turn an MRI into a railgun. Assume zero electronics knowledge. Make no mistakes."

QuercusMax• 3 months ago

I clicked that button - and nothing happened. Truly some great engineering on that blog.

juansaavedrauy3• 3 months ago

I think this is my first post in hn.

I'm a tifosi. But what a poor choice of F1 team to learn from successful, coordinated, well and timely executed pit stops.

geremiiah• 3 months ago

It's tifoso or tifosa (female). Tifosi is plural.

rrr_oh_man2• 3 months ago

Welcoming people in typical HN style

gib444• 3 months ago

Right! Time to go make a panini

ragall• 3 months ago

Well said.

juansaavedrauy3• 3 months ago

È vero! Grazie mille

joe_mamba3• 3 months ago

My thought exactly. When I read the title, I thought they're gonna get more people killed if they use Ferrari F1 pit crew as their learning benchmark lol.

rrr_oh_man2• 3 months ago

That article seems to be from 2012…

ushimitsudoki• 3 months ago

I still vividly remember Massa's pit stop at the 2008 Singapore GP.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Pit+Stop+Felipe...

As a die-hard Schumacher fan, I really wanted to see Massa take the title that year, so it was heartbreaking. And yet, I can't help but laugh every time I see the Ferrari crew looking so dejected, carrying that fuel hose back to the garage like a defeated army.

I suppose we shouldn't apply this "Ferrari system" to medical surgery—unless the patient is prepared to have their aorta dragged out along with the equipment.

cjrp• 3 months ago

To be fair they did win the Fastest Pit Stop Award last season https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article/2025-dhl-fastest-...

gadders3• 3 months ago

>I'm a tifosi.

Like one of those big banners they hold up at football (soccer) matches?

Jeremy1026• 3 months ago

Tifosi is just Italian for "fans". In this context, it's fans of the Ferrari F1 team.

kqr• 3 months ago

Those are called tifo. Tifosi are the people doing the holding.

ericcumbee2• 3 months ago

Pit stops aren't Ferrari's problem. its race Strategy.

themafia• 3 months ago

push now. this is our race.

juansaavedrauy3• 3 months ago

Last year for sure, they managed to have all wheels if I recall correctly.

seymore_12• 3 months ago

Dov'è la gomma? :-)

scrlk• 3 months ago

Next up: learning effective radio communication from Ferrari F1 race engineers ;)

stephencanon• 3 months ago

Must be the water.

joe_mamba3• 3 months ago

- Box now, box.

- S-stay out, stay out.

xxandroxygen• 3 months ago

I love finding this many knowers of F1 lore in a HN thread

JSR_FDED• 3 months ago

Plan D, Charles, plan D.

NooneAtAll3• 3 months ago

let's see how many people lied about being healthcare professionals

nradov• 3 months ago

I have a Red Cross CPR certification (expired) so I'm a healthcare professional, right?

exmadscientist2• 3 months ago

Working in medical device design has trained me to just ignore this crud. I am literally designing the things that plug in to the other side of this object. I kind of need to have them. (I could get them from a contact, and often do, but that's also often slow. Sometimes extremely slow.)

It's done to keep things that require some level of training or discretion in their use away from the general public. Which I definitely understand. But it's still silly. And restricts some stuff unnecessarily. For example, there's an amazing fast epoxy, nothing weird about it, that you simply can't buy without jumping through stupid hoops. They'd make bank selling that stuff to the general industrial market, it performs better than the big boys' best a lot of the time. But... good luck buying it.

cromulent• 3 months ago

(2012). Another article on the same doctor was discussed recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957231

jerkstate• 3 months ago

This means the patient makes up their own strategy and the doctor says “we are checking”

vjvjvjvjghv• 3 months ago

Must be the water.

idan• 3 months ago

was not expecting a HN crossover with /r/formula1 today, but here we are

intheitmines• 3 months ago

If you enjoyed this you'll likely enjoy the checklist manifesto https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6667514-the-checklist-ma...

htrp• 3 months ago

PTSD from "Stay out Stay out"

avgDev• 3 months ago

I don't know, I would worried about learning anything from Ferrari F1 team. As they refuse to learn. If it wasn't for their OP engines, they would not have been competitive FOR MANY years.

Their race strategy has been sabotaging drivers for YEARS.

TIL, I am a health professional on the internet. If you need help with any health problems I am here. /s

hereme888• 3 months ago

One cool aspect of working in a high-performance, critical setting, is you learn and absorb amazingly well-research practices without thinking about what it took for things to get there.

jmward01• 3 months ago

A watch floor turn over in the military or on-station aircraft swap are also good places to look at.

realo• 3 months ago

Ok... so highly paid physicians who like F1 had to absolutely be invited to Ferrari F1 pits in order to learn common sense?

I am an electrical engineer. Can I be invited to some eCar races pits to learn common sense too?

embedding-shape• 3 months ago

From your take aways from this article, what did they learn that was "common sense" exactly? I'm not aware of many people working a lot with handovers to ICUs unless they're already working in a hospital, so maybe it's hard to build up "common sense" from a situation you almost never encounter before you're there?

Anonyneko• 3 months ago

Cue the absolutely inevitable pit wall clown masks meme.

Theodores• 3 months ago

During the pandemic we had F1 teams attempting to solve all the world's problems with their superior tech and methods, but nothing really came of it. This story has overtones of 'here we go again'.

Truth be told, Ferrari don't have normal customers. All of them have to be extremely rich. Even then, they get treated as if they are 'tractor company owners' and not worthy. The F1 team has hundreds of people for running two cars, with those cars needing to drive no more than two hours at a time, with no need for the cars to last more than one season, at a cost of many millions.

Compare with the hospitality sector, where customers come from all walks of life, from all over the world. Money has to be made rather than just spent. Rarely is anyone kept waiting (in a decent hotel) and the customer has to come first, at all cost. There are handovers and checklists, which are no big deal.

From my experience of various hospital stays, where waiting is glacial, I honestly believe that just a little bit of 'customer first' attitude would be helpful. Just a few staff that have experience from the real world of hospitality would make a difference, and I just don't see the F1 people having the basic skills, even if they can do high-octane pitstops in seconds.

ChoGGi• 3 months ago

From my experience of various hospital stays, where waiting is glacial, I honestly believe that just a little bit of 'customer first' attitude would be helpful.

Hospital staff don't eat their own dog food, they get priority.

jeffrallen2• 3 months ago

I can't read it because I'm not a healthcare professional.

trhway2• 3 months ago

The new handover was a four stage process. First, we asked the anaesthetist to fill in a standard form that detailed ...
The receiving doctor used an information transfer aide memoire, a form or checklist specifically designed for this process, to prompt and record the transfer of the appropriate information. Once all the blanks on the form were filled (or discussed where missing), the form was placed in the patient’s notes and acted as the admission note to the ICU, saving everyone time.

if additional forms and checklists save lives, then by all means. I have doubts though. New processes, forms and checklists have high cost, taking additional time and attention resources. If it is an optimization of an already existing process or if the staff have extra amount of their resources to spare then great, otherwise it should come from somewhere. From the same probably already overworked staff. Who as a result would probably shortcut something at some other place. I mean they identified bad transfer of info and less than ideal preparedness of the receiving bed at ICU as the root causes. What was the root cause that the trained staff did such bad info transfer and unpreparedness though? Just a lack of a process/forms/checklists?

Btw, a glaring absence of AI who could have performed necessary forms and checklists data collection and completion (including by automatically pulling data from the OR records and equipment). And similar to codegen, the AI could have produced the plan of transfer and monitor the execution of the transfer steps by the "human agents" (using vision, sensors and RFID badges and tags on humans and equipment, etc.) In that respect the article looks like a medieval text on medicine :)

exmadscientist2• 3 months ago

Checklists are amazingly powerful if they are fast and aligned with staff priorities (or true needs, which should also be aligned with priorities, but that's a separate, and pervasive, issue).

Checklists are worse than useless if they are slow and not relevant.

trhway2• 3 months ago

... and the wisdom to distinguish between it.

Improving ICU handovers by learning from Scuderia Ferrari F1 team

Related Stories