Cardiac arrest is a human problem, not a training problem

When a patient's heart stops, the person leading the code is running on memory alone, and memory fails under that kind of pressure. Michael Peck is an anesthesiologist and retired faculty member at George Washington University who spent more than 30 years watching skilled clinicians get cognitively overwhelmed during a cardiac arrest. In this episode he explains why the problem is not a lack of training but the hard limits of human attention, memory, and decision making during a crisis. This conversation is based on his article "Cognitive overload in cardiac arrest is a human problem," published on KevinMD. You will hear what it actually feels like to run a code with no reference to lean on, why aviation and nuclear power lean on checklists while medicine still does not, and why hospital reviews built on memory may miss what went right as well as what went wrong. Press play to hear why he believes patient safety starts with admitting our limits.

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