Doctors call in FI team for help in accelerating transfer of sick children

Britain's top children's hospital has turned to the world of motor racing for help in moving sick babies at maximum speed and with minimum risk.

Great Ormond Street hospital in London has called in experts from the Maclaren Formula One motor racing team to bring the discipline of the pit stop into the sphere of medical care in an effort to learn how children might be transferred more quickly and safely out of the operating theatre during the critical minutes that follow complex heart surgery.

David Ryan, the Maclaren team manager, has visited the hospital and schooled doctors in how to shave seconds off a tyre change. Doctors hope to adapt the method to help medical teams to insert lines, tubes and syringes and begin monitoring vital functions as soon as possible after a baby who has had surgery arrives in the intensive care unit.

Specialists at the hospital, led by Martin Elliott, a cardiac surgeon, believed the speed and efficiency displayed by motor racing teams at pit stops offered the closest parallel for the improvements they were seeking to make and so contacted Maclaren for advice.

Members of the Maclaren team will return to the hospital later this month to examine a plan drawn up by doctors to improve the transfers.

Mr Elliott, who is director of transplantation at the hospital, said: "The potential for hazard when transferring patients to a new team, who have to relearn in just a few seconds everything that we have learnt about a patient during a six-hour operation, is high.

"There are some simple, mechanical aspects to that transfer that looked ridiculous and we noticed that these Formula One guys seemed to be able to handle transfers rather well."

Jane Carthey, a researcher at the Institute of Child Health who has worked on the new plan, said: "Our handover [from operating theatre to intensive care unit] is our pit stop. It is a critical point where information can get lost. Just as a Formula One race can be won or lost on the pit stop, for us it can mean the difference between winning or losing the battle for the baby."

After a long and complex operation the baby, who is highly vulnerable, must be detached from one set of tubes and lines in the operating theatre, then wheeled to the intensive care unit and finally reconnected. At the same time, the ITU team has to absorb a lot of information from the surgical team about the way the baby is responding and how its condition can be kept stable.

Ms Carthey added: "We are dealing with very fragile, high-risk patients and we can't aim for anything less than a perfect handover. It is a window of potential crisis that we want to close off."