Fast Company (Internet / Print) April 2006 http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/104/ (no direct weblink available) Teaching medical staff to work like a flight team Brain surgery isn't rocket science. But perhaps it should be. If medical staff worked together as a flight team does, they'd communicate more effectively, make fewer mistakes, and lose fewer lives. And if there's a problem, even the team's most junior members are trained to say something. That's tricky, since it means confronting medicine's doctor-as-deity culture. "It's sort of like giving permission to speak up," says Jennifer Baer, senior director of outcomes and performance improvement at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, who went through the six-month training last year with 627 other staffers. "Something as complicated as an OR procedure requires everyone being able to pick up on things that could lead to problems."