Challenges and opportunities for improving patient safety through Human Factors and systems engineering (November 2018)

Summary

Despite progress on patient safety since the publication of the Institute of Medicine’s 1999 report, To Err Is Human, significant problems remain. Human factors and systems engineering (HF/SE) has been increasingly recognized and advocated for its value in understanding, improving, and redesigning processes for safer care, especially for complex interacting sociotechnical systems. However, broad awareness of HF/SE and its adoption into safety improvement work have been frustratingly slow. We provide an overview of HF/SE, its demonstrated value to a wide range of patient safety problems (in particular, medication safety), and challenges to its broader implementation across health care. We make a variety of recommendations to maximise the spread of HF/SE, including formal and informal education programmes, greater adoption of HF/SE by health care organisations, expanded funding to foster more clinician-engineer partnerships, and coordinated national efforts to design and operationalise a system for spreading HF/SE into health care nationally.