Prior to his post as an airline pilot, Captain Niall Downey qualified as a doctor from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1993, and trained as a surgeon in Belfast. Now, he explains to NIHR why taking on-board the lessons garnered from aviation can reduce the number of patients being inadvertently harmed by simple human error in our health services.
1. Firstly, and crucially, aviation accepts that error is inevitable, no matter
how good we are, and no matter how hard we work. We operate a ‘just…