Commentary
Failure Is Not an Option
Fed Pract. 2012 October;29(10):7
Author and Disclosure Information
William R. Finch, MD
When things went horribly wrong on the Apollo 13 mission, Gene Kranz apocryphally said, “Failure is not an option.” The statement was followed with an intense diagnostic effort by NASA to determine the nature of the problem and formulate a plan to save 3 lives. I thought about this recently when I took my 95-year-old father, a retired podiatrist, to the emergency department (ED) of a large municipal hospital.