Selecting safe and easy to use products for healthcare (April 2020)

Summary

Using human factors science increases the likelihood of obtaining well-designed and easy to use products to deliver safe patient care. Poor designs, by contrast, can cause unintended harm to patients.

This guide, developed by the Clinical Human Factors Group, is to help staff working in procurement or with medical devices and equipment, to use human factors to specify and select the best and safest products to use in healthcare. This is important because conformity with regulations and standards does not always guarantee safe outcomes when products are used in practice.

This guide is particularly relevant to medical devices but can be used for other healthcare products.