paywall

Article text:

Molly Hudson, Motor Racing Reporter Friday September 13 2024, 3.00pm BST, The Times

At the Dutch Grand Prix, among the sports stars and musicians who strolled around the Zandvoort paddock and filled the grid was a different kind of VIP, Professor Martin Elliott, who spent much of his career as a paediatric cardiothoracic surgeon — operating on children’s hearts and lungs — at Great Ormond Street Hospital.

There may seem no obvious connection to Formula 1, but Elliott was a guest of Ferrari, thanks to the relationship he has built with them for more than two decades after their respective fields of interest collided serendipitously one Sunday afternoon.

Marc de Laval — a Belgian surgeon who was Elliott’s predecessor — in his research into a field of work called “human factors” discovered there were several theories around how people interact with each other either positively or negatively to affect an outcome. An investigation into a crisis at Bristol Children’s Hospital had found that the journey from the operating room to the intensive care unit was, in itself, dangerous because people made it so, despite their best intentions.

This was where Formula 1 entered the story.

“We were basically just knackered one Sunday lunchtime,” Elliott, 73, says. “We’d been operating on Saturday, transplanted on Saturday night, another operation on Sunday morning and slumped down in front of the TV. I was sitting there with Allan Goldman, a South African colleague, and we watched a McLaren pitstop.

“It was very fast — when they were refuelling in those days — and there were a few shots which suddenly reminded us of the problem we were facing. Essentially, if you look down on the pitstop from above, there’s your [driver] in the car and all the people looking after that precious parcel and when you look down on a baby on a trolley moving from one place to the other, it’s the same thing.”

Elliott and Goldman decided that if McLaren could refuel a car and change the tyres in less than seven seconds, then they could surely improve their process of transporting babies.

They approached McLaren, who found an engineering solution: having a multifunctional operating table which was also a trolley and an intensive care unit bed. “It was the right answer but unachievable,” Elliott explains, the type of thinking that creates success in professional sport but is unaffordable for the NHS.

By chance, at a management conference, they bumped into a representative of Shell, which partners Ferrari and passed on contact details. They secured a research grant that allowed Ferrari and Great Ormond Street to collaborate, and Elliott even travelled to Ferrari’s headquarters in Maranello. The findings were stark.

“We had them look at our process map, which didn’t exist, and their process map, which was massive. Getting them to look at what we did in the same detail. They thought we were useless,” Elliott says, before joking that this was the politest term he could use for what Ferrari actually thought.

Ferrari split their key areas of focus into categories: leadership, task sequence and allocation, risk prediction, discipline and composure and practice. Elliott admits Ferrari thought his hospital’s practices were “useless” when they first teamed up

They soon discovered that many of the good intentions surgeons and nurses had were in fact part of the problem. At a pitstop, everyone has dedicated roles and responsibilities, from those taking the wheel off to the leader who defines when the car is safe to be released into the pitlane.

If something went wrong in the journey to theatre — such as a crucial wire becoming unattached — all staff would rush to the issue in an attempt to fix it, rather than having the discipline and structure for one dedicated staff member to do so in a less panicked manner.

“There was a quote from Ross Brawn [the former Ferrari technical director] when we were working with him: ‘If you want to be the best team in Formula 1, everybody has to want to be world champion at what they do.’ In other words, the person cleaning the pit, wiping any grease off the outside of the car which would slow it down, all those people have to do it perfectly, and they’ve got to want that common goal if you’re going to make it a success.”

After implementing the learnings they had been given by Ferrari, the average number of technical errors per handover fell by 42 per cent and “information handover omissions” fell by 49 per cent. After initial resistance, these steps were rolled out at many hospitals across the country and remain to this day.

“It was very interesting talking to Ferrari in Zandvoort. They’ve been approached by lots of hospitals to say, oh, they don’t believe it, but when they’ve redone the work, the same thing happens,” Elliott adds.

Through the relationship with Formula 1, a number of other discoveries were made: the computational flow dynamics used in wind tunnels mirror the mathematics used in an MRI scanner, and the data on the pitwall graphs that predicts the failure of a car component is similar to that used on a life support machine.

Williams helped to design a “babypod”, which is a lightweight box made of carbon fibre with a sliding transparent lid, that can be used to transport critically ill infants.

As Elliott says his goodbyes, he emphasises that any advancements made were not solely by him, but a reflection of the entire team, and the attitude at Great Ormond Street. That is the exact quality that brings such success and collaboration in Formula 1 teams.