Excellence in Professional Peak Performance Hope to Believe and a Goal to Achieve “Part 1”

Abstract

We have crises of professionalism in medical practice which undermines humanism. “The first do no harm” principal stated by Hippocrates more than 2400 years ago is violated. Health care system is a risky domain as the third leading cause of death in America is medical errors, and, half of the mortalities are in the operating room, intensive care unit, as well as in emergency department. Superior knowledge and clinical skills are not sufficient in themselves; as achievement of excellence and professionalism depends on successful interplay of personal qualities and the environment in which they work. We aim to code and categorize the cognitive and mental skills required for excellence and professionalism associated with exceptional peak performance which are poorly defined and rarely incorporated into clinical and anesthetic curriculum. We hope to facilitate education of this tacit dimension of practice needed for patient safety and serenity. We may counteract this defect in health care system through a Multi-Dimensional Protective Vision which is composed of knowledge of human factors, catalogue of cognitive errors with overemphasis on correcting those thought-process errors. We will define Non-Technical Skills which are cognitive, behavioral and interpersonal abilities that are not specific to one profession, but crucial to safety. They are expressed as; art of decision making, task management, situation awareness, communication, and team work in addition to stress management. We will explain the science of High Reliability Organizations which are those organizations like commercial aviation flight and nuclear power stations which are running high risk tasks with excellent safety records. We are going to show the behavioral markers of Crises Resource Management and the coordination strategies that are used to improve safety profile in anesthetic and surgical teams. We suggest audio-video record in risky domain to detect peak performance to learn from, and correct poor performance.