Wales Ergonomics and Safer Patients Alliance (WESPA)

Summary

The Wales Ergonomics and Safer Patients Alliance (WESPA) was formed in response to supporting the NHS during the COVID-19 pandemic.

WESPA comprises early career and senior researchers from across Cardiff University (Business, Engineering, Mathematics, Medicine) with expertise in operations management, human factors and resilience engineering. We work closely with NHS professionals (clinicians, managers and executives) to model how the design of health services impact on staff and patient outcomes.

Content

WESPA's primary aim is to carry out applied research driven by clinical need by drawing upon research expertise from across Cardiff University to enable innovation and implementation of practices to improve patient safety in the NHS, by:

• Partnering with NHS organisations, and working directly with NHS staff, to identify improvement priorities, it will:
  - embed researchers-in-residence to analyse patient safety data and observe in clinical settings; 
  - build capability to develop data infrastructures that promote timely organisational learning to inform service design, planning and management;
  - evaluate models of service delivery to identify where and how the service can be designed / redesigned to improve staff and patient outcomes.
• Leading engagement activities with key stakeholders – healthcare professionals, managers, executives, patients, services users and the public – to gain timely feedback on our research findings.
• Facilitating co-production activities in the NHS to maximise understanding of human factors influencing staff and patient outcomes.
• Engaging with the third sector and other organisations with the purpose of influencing policy and achieving impact in the NHS.

Research

• Development and testing of methodological approaches to apply human factors theory, principles and tools in the NHS to understand and learn from complex socio-technical systems;
• Identification of opportunities for health systems improvement from analysis of routine patient safety data; and,
• Understanding complex systems by modelling and quantifying variability using the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM).