How the Formula 1 pit stop has saved thousands of babies

In 2001, Professor Martin Elliott and Dr. Allan Goldman from England’s Great Ormond Street Hospital were facing a problem — they were struggling with making a smooth transition of babies in emergency situations from the operating room to the intensive care unit. With tubes, wires, machines, and life-support systems all needing to move in sync, many babies were not surviving the transfer due to mistakes.

One day, the two doctors happened to watch a F1 (Formula 1) race and were impressed with the pit crew’s ability to effortlessly lift the car, change its tires, refuel it (which is no longer part of an F1 pit stop), and send the car back onto the track in less than six seconds. They decided to call the Ferrari F1 team, who then invited the doctors to the home of Ferrari in Maranello, Italy.

The members of the pit crew watched videos of the hospital transfers and noticed that their process was uncoordinated, lacked clear leadership, and was too noisy. So, they sat the doctors down and taught them where to have each person stand around the operating table and how to have defined roles; created rehearsed, structured routines for them; implemented the use of debriefs and checklists; and showed them how to communicate with each other without barely saying a word — just like they do in an F1 pit box.

The results from implementing these new protocols were published in a 2007 report and showed that the hospital reduced critical handover errors by 67%.

These techniques were not only implemented in the Great Ormond Street Hospital but also in hospitals around the world. And Ferrari isn’t the only F1 team to help hospital workers.

In 2016, the Williams F1 team worked with health care workers in the University Hospital of Wales (UHW) in Cardiff to implement pit stop methods to aid with the resuscitation of newborn babies in the neonatal intensive care unit.

After working with the Williams pit crew, the team at UHW implemented a number of changes including the auditing and streamlining of the resuscitation equipment cart to ensure that equipment can be located as quickly as possible, and a standardized floor space was mapped out in delivery rooms to clearly show the area for the neonatal resuscitation team to work in. This copies the customized floor map Williams takes to races to map out the specific pit box requirements at each track.

The UHW team also implemented more use of hand signals rather than verbal communication and video analysis to analyze their performance following a resuscitation.

Claire Williams, the team’s former deputy team principal, said in a statement that the team was “delighted to assist” when they were approached by UHW.

“Their work is vitally important and the pressure they work under is difficult to comprehend; it’s a matter of life and death every day of the week,” she said.

“If some of the advice we have passed on helps to save a young life then this would have been an extremely worthy endeavor,” Williams added. “We are increasingly finding that Formula 1 know-how and technology can have benefits to other industries, and this is a great example.”