CERN safety reaches out to medicine

CERN has long been recognised as a centre of excellence in physics, and its spin-offs in fields such as medicine have been widely hailed. But increasingly, the Laboratory's expertise in the management of large international collaborations is also being recognised. Contacts between CERN and organizations like ESA and ESO, as well as with industry, bear witness to this fact. One recent example comes from Airbus Industrie, which organized a meeting in 1998 with CERN to compare notes on project management, safety, and quality assurance.

Safety management is a recognised speciality in the field of project management and at CERN, TIS and the safety officials in the Divisions lead the way. However, all members of the personnel and management, as well as users, contribute to the Laboratory's safety culture and excellent safety record. To achieve this, safety instructions, procedures, and management tools have to be put in place and maintained. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that CERN specialists Bill Nuttall, Deputy Group Leader for General Safety and Hygiene, and Reiner Schmidt, GLIMOS of the CMS experiment, were invited to speak at a neurosurgery conference - even though the field is far removed from particle physics. Their invitation followed a meeting between Helmut Schönbacher, Head of TIS, and conference organiser, Professor H.-J. Steiger, at which both recognised the potential synergy.
CERN's two engineers spoke at the opening plenary session of the conference, which was entirely devoted to speakers from fields other than neurosurgery. They joined such prestigious company as British psychologist, Charles Vincent, and Lufthansa's chief pilot, Captain Dehning. Their talks covered 'Techniques for hazard analysis and their use at CERN' and 'Safety of novel projects - the battle against Murphy's Law'. Nuttall's talk, which took a hands-on, practical approach to the question led naturally into Schmidt's analysis of how human factors could help tame Murphy's Law. He covered some of the main human weaknesses affecting safety - habituation, selective perception, generalisation, and risk taking - before discussing the advantages of team work in flat hierarchies, a working-practice that could be very effectively deployed in neurosurgery.
And the sharing of knowledge was not one-way. CERN and other disciplines can also learn from neurosurgery, as the conference amply demonstrated. Neurosurgeons involved in delicate operations can apparently experience the same behaviour and reaction-time influencing physiological changes as pilots confronted with additional engine-loss during emergency landings. The medical community has already taken this lesson on-board, and is studying the possibility of using simulators for training surgeons in the same way that airlines use them for pilots. The CERN representatives also noted the commendable efforts made by the medical community to maintain the safety competence of medical teams as first priority in an increasingly difficult environment of mounting administrative, budgetary, and legal burdens. These are examples of the kind of cross-fertilisation that happened at the conference, leaving CERN's representatives with plenty to think about as they packed their bags to come home.