FORMULA 1 AND TREATING HEART ATTACKS. I posted here six years ago about how doctors at a British hospital had studied and consulted with a Formula 1 pit crew to improve their handoffs from the cardiac care unit to the intensive care unit.
Gina Kolata describes the new procedures adopted by the DB2 task force at a New Jersey hospital (DB2 stands for door to balloon time, the time from when a patient enters the hospital to the time when a balloon is inserted in a blocked artery) as follows:
“Now when a patient arrives, staff members swarm the stretcher and within five minutes undress the patient, place defibrillator pads on the chest, insert two intravenous lines, shave the patient’s groin where the catheter will be inserted and snaked up to the heart, supply oxygen through a cannula in the nose, and provide medications like morphine, a blood thinner, and a drug to control heart rhythms.”
Although Formula 1 is not mentioned in the article, the coordinated movements are a lot like what a pit crew does in changing tires and topping up fuel tanks in 6.9 seconds.
Ever since you posted about the extreme efficiency of checklists as applied in the remarkably quick pit stop procedure for F1 I’ve made note of where they are applied wisely elsewhere. (I’m afraid it doesn’t come up as often as it might.) One of my art heroes mentioned recently that he creates a checklist of elements he wants to include in a painting when he is at the composition stage doing small, rough thumbnail sketches. If he has balancing several needs at once and is getting into the creative flow he doesn’t want to forget an element that he wants to include. He recommends this to his students without hesitation.
This sound like a good list for writers as well, especially for constructing a long
piece. Of course, elements get discarded when they don’t fit or don’t work.
But the last thing you want is to forget to include something that would benefit the
piece.
Working on Draft II of a new play, I discovered, just by happenstance, a new process.
For two weeks after hearing the first draft done as a reading, I didn’t approach a rewrite. But ideas kept coming to me, and I wrote them down on note cards and amassed quite a good stack on my desk. When I began the rewrite, I reviewed all the cards, as well as the notes I had taken from critiques of the piece, and then I reread the original script. I stuck post-its with the new ideas to pages in the script where they might fit. Of course, still had to re-order the scenes, delete, etc. But whenever I saw how the plot should go, I didn’t stop to write it up. I just put a post-it with a note, to mark the place where that plot point should be treated. This made the first draft
both an outline of sorts and a repository for two weeks of insights. It was fun to come to a new section and see a core idea sitting there, and then work on developing it.