Kenneth
Catchpole,
PhD

Dr. Kenneth Catchpole is a cognitive scientist and human factors practitioner whose work has transformed how healthcare systems understand and prevent harm. His foundational insight is simple and profound: most medical errors are not individual failures — they are systemic ones, rooted in how tasks, teams, technology, and environments are designed.

Beginning at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, Dr. Catchpole pioneered direct observation methods to understand why surgical errors occur in congenital heart surgery. His landmark handover studies — which drew on practices from Formula 1 racing and aviation — produced safety protocols now adopted in hospitals worldwide.

At Oxford, he evaluated teamwork and Lean quality interventions. At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, he directed human factors research in trauma care and helped design the Operating Room of the Future. Since joining MUSC in 2016, he has led AHRQ-funded studies on robotic surgery, anesthesia medication delivery, and sterile processing — earning the SmartState Endowed Chair in Clinical Practice and Human Factors.

His most celebrated work remains the Formula 1 pit stop study — in which he and colleagues visited Ferrari's headquarters in Maranello to study how pit crews coordinate under pressure, then redesigned the patient handover process from cardiac surgery to the ICU at Great Ormond Street Hospital. The resulting protocol produced a significant reduction in technical errors and information omissions, was covered by the Wall Street Journal, and has since been adopted by hospitals worldwide.

His definition of Clinical Human Factors was adopted by the NHS as the canonical framework for communicating the discipline to clinicians across the United Kingdom.