Project management is a discipline that requires many skills. A project manager must have knowledge and experience relating to budgeting and planning, as well as people skills and the ability to make decisions under pressure. The former can be learned in the classroom or through lessons. The latter, however, is learned on the job in real-world scenarios. When it comes to making decisions under pressure and getting things done quickly, what better place to get project managements lessons than from the emergency room?
The average person leads a fairly uneventful life on a day-to-day basis. We go to work, put in our hours in, mingle with our coworkers, tend to our personal affairs, and spend time at home. The next fews days often look similar.
In many ways, this is actually a great thing – an uneventful day is far superior to a day of tragedy, fear or life-changing events. We often have fuzzy memories of the days that we’re overall content, but doing nothing special. However, memories of an accident, medical emergency or worse are vivid, sharp and never forgotten, often for our entire lives. The day we rush to the hospital for any reason is a day we won’t be forgetting about anytime soon…
Turns out, there’s a whole host of people who are having one of these days, EVERY DAY. The faces change, but the accidents and emergencies often stay the same. In each one of our neighborhoods or areas, there is a hospital who is routinely receiving the next emergency situation. They’re ready and waiting for it actually, with a staff of technicians, nurses and doctors standing by. They must act quickly, work together, diagnose the situation, make decisions and follow through. This happens again and again.
The Emergency Room Is A Tough Place
If there’s one place you don’t want to end up in, it’s the emergency room during a BIG emergency. The people who work in these environments are battle-hardened, having seen blood, heard gut-wrenching sounds and showed up again the next day to do it all again.
According to the CDC, there are nearly 43 million injury-related visits to the emergency room every year. That’s over 115,000 per day. That’s more than one per second.
About 2.2 million of these visitors are then admitted to the critical care unit each year. These are patients who are monitored around the clock and are in life-threatening condition. That’s over 6,000 people per day.
Data from the CDC shows that 39% of all visitors are seen within 15 minutes of arriving. More than one in three. This means that some patients are prioritized over others by the emergency room team, which is for a reason. This also means that multiple emergency patients arrive at any one time.
Now that we’ve scared the crap out of ourselves, let’s talk project management. Sure a place like the emergency room has some useful techniques and practices that we can benefit from. Let’s get into them.
What Can We Learn About Project Management From The Emergency Room?
In this article, we’ll focus on three project management examples from the healthcare industry – specifically, the emergency room:
- Triage – Prioritization With Dire Consequences
- Attention To Detail – Making Life Or Death Decisions Based On The Information At Hand
- Chain Of Command – Everyone Has Specific Responsibilities & Duties When An Emergency Patient Comes In
Project Management In The Emergency Room: Medical Triage
Triage is a process of prioritizing an emergency patient based on how severe their particular condition is. Here is a triage chart that outlines how to determine a patient’s priority. As you can see, if you walk in on your own, you will only be seen if there are no patients in more severe condition than you.
At its’ core, the triage system is in place so medical staff can prioritize the most critical patients first. Let’s think of some project management scenarios that are high priority, which must be tended to immediately:
- A major deadline is approaching, and missing it will have massive repercussions.
- Losing a critical team member.
- A safety accident.
- Cash flow problems or cost overruns that will blow the budget.
Generally, any unexpected impact to the project management ‘big 3’ is urgent on the triage scale: budget, schedule & quality.
Prioritizing your project using a form of triage system will help keep everything moving forward, and will help you properly allocate resources and attention.
Project Management In The Emergency Room: Attention To Detail
The next crucial skill in an emergency room is attention to detail.
When a patient first arrives and is not walking on their own, the team checks the patient’s mental status and vital signs.
When the patient is critically wounded, they’ll need to be operated on right away. A trauma team is on standby most of the time – the surgeon, nurses anesthesiologist and technicians will often stay on-call in the hospital. The patient’s airway, breathing and circulation are checked to determine the next step.
If the patient is not checked for these specific things, they could be given improper treatment for their condition, and possibly die.
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If a patient can’t breathe on their own, they’ll need an air way. If they aren’t circulating blood, they’ll need other specific urgent care.
Much like on a project, procedures in the emergency room must follow a certain order. Examples of attention to detail and sequence in project management include:
- Getting approvals on items before proceeding.
- Following a specific means and methods sequence.
- Testing products or programs.
- Performing mockups and samples.
- Acting in accordance with the legal portions of the contract.
Attention to detail is significant enough to make or break a project. In the emergency room, it’s life or death.
Project Management In The Emergency Room: Chain Of Command
Inside the ER, each worker on the team has responsibilities.
The paramedics transporting the patient must keep them in the best possible condition until the patient gets into the hospital.
Once there, trauma nurses and residents (physicians in training) begin checking the patient for their vitals, as described above. They report to the ER physician.
The ER physician, along with any medical students who may be rotating through, will evaluate the patient and decide the next steps. This could be calling in a general surgeon or a specialist like a cardiologist.
Every staff member has specific responsibilities. They know what they are in charge of doing, who to report to and how to keep the progress flowing.
Project management also requires these things:
- There is a clear chain of command, usually in the form of a flow chart, of all staff members on the project.
- Reviews and approvals are done in a specific sequence.
- Entry-level team members usually focus on day-to-day work, while senior members look at the project’s big picture.
- Important decisions are made by a designated person – usually the aptly-named decision maker.
Both the emergency room and the project team rely on staff members to perform specific duties. Clear guidelines on what each team member is responsible for are vital to the operation.
In Conclusion
Project management and emergency room operations are not so different. In studying the inner workings of the emergency room, we can observe many examples of good project management and learn a few lessons as well. We hope you’ve found this article informative!
