Search the hub
Showing results for tags 'Human factors'.
Found 550 results
-
Content ArticleEngaging with company executives over how their decisions affect employees’ performance further down the line could help improve safety at sea. An 18-month study found investigations of maritime accidents tend to “blame the ship”, often resulting in the punishment of seafarers. Authors Barry Kirwan, Ben Wood and Beatrice Bettignies-Thiebaux of Eurocontrol, argue that this approach hampers learning and more attention needs to be paid to contributory factors from higher up the chain. They say that a deeper understanding of organisational influences and how company culture contributes to accidents will help promote safety across the business and better address problems. They have developed a ‘Reverse Swiss Cheese Maritime Model’ which moves from organisation through design and fleet support to vessel operations. To facilitate this, they believe there needs to be greater engagement between analysts and the industry’s decision makers and are hoping to trial their approach with several organisations over the next year. Barry, who presented the findings at our recent conference, said: “We need to look not only at how ‘work is done’ but how ‘business is done’.”
-
Content ArticleEffective incident investigation is an integral part of the provision of a safe blood transfusion service, with the aim to prevent recurrence of adverse events and harm to patients. Determining how an incident has taken place allows understanding of the gaps or failures within the system and identification of effective corrective and preventive measures that can be implemented to reduce risk of recurrence. Consideration of human factors supports a more sophisticated understanding of the factors that cause incidents, optimising human performance through better understanding of human behaviour and the factors that influence this behaviour, thus improving patient safety.
-
Content ArticleThis webinar hosted by the National Orthopaedic Alliance (NOA) gives a brief overview of human factors and ergonomics, its relevance and role in improving patient safety, how it has been embedded in one organisation and the impact it has had. Fran Ives, Human Factors Specialist and part of the Human Factors team at the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Hospital (RJAH) speaks about her experience of applying Human Factors both within a large NHS Trust and an Academic Health Science Network, including the successes and challenges of setting up and developing a service, and what difference such a service can make.
-
Content ArticleBehind the scenes at one of the UK’s biggest hospitals as it transitions from old to new. The Royal Liverpool University Hospital moves thousands of patients and staff to a new building. This programme documents their journey, the challenges faced and human factors involved.
-
Content ArticleMost healthcare systems across the globe are dealing with the reality of limited resources and staffing shortages. Therefore, it is more important than ever to ensure that health care professionals spend time on doing what matters most and providing the most value for service users. Meaningful time spent face to face is a high priority for both service users and health care professionals. Paying more attention to computers than people because of the demands of burdensome documentation diverts our attention from direct care. It is a situation that is unsatisfactory for all parties. The Danish municipality of Sønderborg, a safety leader in nursing home and home-based care for more than a decade, decided to see what could be done. With improvement science already embedded in their organisation, they decided to take a deep dive into their processes as a first step. Mistakes in documentation, coordination, and communication have been identified as among the top 10 of root causes of patient safety incidents in Denmark, so it made sense to start there. Patient safety is often cited as the reason for documentation, but some research indicates that burdensome documentation is associated with increased medical errors, mistakes in documentation, and burnout among health care providers. Working from the theory that safely simplifying or streamlining documentation would free up time for direct care, Sønderborg and the Danish Society for Patient Safety embarked on an improvement journey that started with understanding the workflow of documentation that enabled staff to seek and share information from one another to plan and perform different tasks.
-
Content ArticleHealthcare can be risky. Adverse events carry a high cost – both human and financial – for health systems around the world. So in an effort to improve safety, many health systems have looked to learn from high-risk industries. The aviation and nuclear industries, for example, have excellent safety records despite operating in hazardous conditions. And increasingly, the tools and procedures these industries use to identify hazards are being adopted in healthcare. One prominent example involves the Hierarchy of Risk Controls (HoC) approach, which works by ranking the methods of controlling risks based on their expected effectiveness. According to HoC, the risks at the top are presumed to be more effective than those at the bottom. The ones at the top typically rely less on human behaviour: for example, a new piece of technology is considered to be a stronger risk control than training staff. This article looks more deeply at the (HoC) approach to explore its usefulness and effectiveness in healthcare. To investigate this issue, a team of social scientists examined the risk controls introduced by four hospital teams in England and Scotland after they had identified hazards in their systems.
-
Content ArticleSteven Shorrock is an interdisciplinary humanistic, systems and design practitioner interested in human work from multiple perspectives. In this blog, he reflects on what he has learned from 25 years as a human factors expert, highlighting that human factors is essentially about improving work, via design.
-
Content ArticleThis download is the second of three chapters of a book which complements the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors' Healthcare Learning Pathway and is intended as a practical resource for students.
-
Content ArticleIn 1999, the pivotal report “To Err is Human” by the Institute of Medicine led to sweeping changes in healthcare. This report outlined how blaming individuals does not change the underlying factors that contribute to medical errors. It also stated that blaming an individual does little to make the system safer – or prevent someone else from similar errors. It is unusual for a nurse to be charged criminally, when there is no intent to harm a patient. However, the recent trial in America of nurse RaDonda Vaught could set a precedent for future medical errors to be treated as criminal cases. The case may ensure that for every step that has been taken forward in patient safety, we have now taken two steps backwards. This article from Human Factors 101 looks at the case of RaDonda Vaught, the criminal trial and conviction, and discusses the impact this will have on healthcare.
-
Content Article
Blog - Is human error a crime? (2 November 2022)
Patient-Safety-Learning posted an article in Legal matters
Martin Anderson, author of the Human Factors 101 blog, looks at the case of US nurse RaDonda Vaught, who was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide and abuse of an impaired adult following a medication error that led to a patient death in 2017. He provides a timeline of the events that occurred in the run up to the criminal trial and highlights concerns that the case will set a precedent in bringing criminal charges against nurses when there is no intent to harm a patient. He then looks at the system factors that may have contributed to the medication error, asking a number of questions about the circumstances under which Vaught made the error. The blog goes on to outline the serious impact the case could have on healthcare professionals' willingness to report errors, take on complex cases and use innovative treatments—it may even put people off taking on a career in the healthcare sector in the first place. -
Content ArticleIn this analysis, published by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, the authors look at the impact of double checking medication to reduce errors and improve patient safety.
-
Content Article
Advancing Quality Alliance: Safety Culture Survey
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Culture
This programme from the Advancing Quality Alliance (Aqua) provides participants with the tools, skills and knowledge to oversee the successful implementation of a safety culture survey in organisations. Participants of this programme will develop a working knowledge of safety culture theory and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) safety culture survey alongside the support that Aqua provides to enable deployment and analysis of the survey. This programme links directly to Aqua’ safety offers, including Psychological Safety, Human Factors and Improvement Practitioner programmes. -
Content ArticleFor two decades, Swiss Cheese theory has been an influential metaphor in safety science and accident prevention. It has made barrier theory and the impact of safety culture on operational safety more understandable to the upper echelons of high-risk organisations in many industrial sectors. Yet sometimes the Swiss Cheese model is used to focus on the operational ‘sharp end’ and unsafe acts, like a magnifying glass that acknowledges organizational influence, but still targets the human operator. It is time to ‘turn this lens around and allow organisations to focus on the upstream factors and decision-making that can engender these unsafe acts in the first place. This paper reports on an approach to do this, under development in the Maritime sector, called Reverse Swiss Cheese.
-
Content ArticleSafety in aviation and maritime domains has greatly improved over the years, but there is no room for complacency. This is especially the case as we approach systems with ever more automation and use of remote control in both industries. It is also more complicated because ‘human error’ is often seen as the root cause, when usually it is the system that leads people into mistakes, and seafarers and flight crew alike so often save the day. Accidents, incidents and near misses all offer us valuable lessons from which to improve safety, to do better next time. Yet in the aftermath of adverse events, the wish to blame someone, which makes sense of something that was never intended to happen, might make us lose sight of the real causes of accidents, leading to more tragedy and loss. The key to learning is using the right tool with which to understand what happened and why. This means going beyond the surface ‘facts’ and suppositions, seeing beneath the ‘usual suspects’ of factors that yield little in terms of how to prevent the next one. The SHIELD (Safety Human Incident & Error Learning Database) taxonomy has been developed by reviewing a number of existing taxonomies - in this case, a set of related terms for describing human performance and error - to derive a means of objectively classifying events in a way that helps us develop safety countermeasures afterwards. Whilst it can analyse single events it is particularly insightful when looking - and learning - across related events
-
Content ArticleThis chapter from the book 'Managing future challenges for safety' starts with the premise that the future of work is unpredictable. This has been illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and further profound changes in contexts of work will bring significant and volatile changes to future work, as well as health, safety, security, and productivity. Micronarrative testimony from healthcare practitioners whose work has been affected dramatically by the emergence of the pandemic is used in this chapter to derive learning from experience of this major change. The narratives concern the nature of responding to a rapidly changing world, work-as-imagined and work-as-done, human-centred design and systems thinking and practice, and leadership and social capital. Seven learning points were drawn from clinicians’ reflections that may be more widely relevant to the future of work.
-
Content ArticleThis article by Penelope Hawe from the Menzies Center for Health Policy at the University of Sydney, looks at complexity and how it increases the unpredictability of interventions in systems. She argues that new metaphors and terminology are needed to capture the recognition that knowledge generation comes from the hands of practitioners as much as it comes from intervention researchers.
-
Content ArticleReliable patient identification is essential for safe care, but system factors such as working conditions, technology, organisational barriers and inadequate communications protocols can interfere with identification. This study in the Journal of Patient Safety aimed to explore systems factors contributing to patient identification errors during intrahospital transfers. The authors observed 60 patient transfer handovers and found that patient identification was not conducted correctly in any of them (according to the hospital policy at every step of the process). The principal system factor responsible was organisational failure, followed by technology and team culture issues. The authors highlight a disconnect between the policy and the reality of the workplace, which left staff and patients in the study vulnerable to the consequences of misidentification.
-
Content ArticleCommunity Diagnostic Centres (CDCs) can relieve pressure on NHS acute services and bring diagnostic services closer to patients. This resource by the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics & Human Factors (CIEHF) explores ten principles for including systems thinking in the design of the diagnostic workforce and CDC services.
-
Content ArticleThis worksheet produced by NHS Education for Scotland is designed to be used by healthcare teams as a prompt to highlight the various system-wide factors that contribute to an issue. It aims to help teams understand how these factors relate and interact to produce different outcomes.
-
Event
Using human factors to support clinical decision making
Sam posted an event in Community Calendar
untilCoping with complexity: how a human factors systems approach can support competency development for pharmacists. Support in clinical decision making is recognised as an educational development need for pharmacists. The health policy landscape puts the pharmacist in a central role for clinical management of long-term complex morbidities, making clinical decision making and taking responsibility for patient outcomes increasingly important. This is compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, where healthcare environments have become more complex and challenging to navigate. In this environment, foundation pharmacists were unable to sit the GPhC registration assessment during the summer of 2020 but provisionally the registration assessment is due to take place online during the first quarter of 2021. In response to this, a suite of resources has been developed with collaboration between Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors (CIEHF) and Health Education England (HEE). These resources are aimed in particular at early career pharmacists and their supervisors, especially those in foundation pharmacist positions managing the transition from education to the workplace environment. This session will act as the launch event for these resources and can support early career pharmacists and supervisors to navigate the CIEHF learning resources developed so far. Register -
Event
Ergonomics and Human Factors 2021
Patient Safety Learning posted an event in Community Calendar
untilWhether you’re an industry or business leader, a human factors practitioner, researcher or academic, the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics & Human Factors showcase the very best that the discipline has to offer at one of the largest gatherings of ergonomists and human factors professionals in the world. Further information and registration -
EventAimed at clinicians and managers, this national conference will provide a practical guide to human factors in healthcare, and how a human factors approach can improve patient care, quality, process and safety. You will have the opportunity to network with colleagues who are working to embed a human factors approach, self-assess and reflect on your own practice and gain CPD accreditation points contributing to professional development and revalidation evidence. Book your place or email kerry@hc-uk.org.uk hub members can receive a 20% discount. Email info@pslhub.org to receive the discount code. Follow the conference on Twitter #HumanFactors
- Posted
- 2 comments
-
-
Content ArticlePatient safety is often compromised by confusion over the graphic information on drugs packaging. Injectable medicines are particularly susceptible to medical error. This study gives design guidance to make such packs safer.
-
Content ArticleModels and methods of work system design need to be developed and implemented to advance research in and design for patient safety. In this paper, Carayon et al. describe how the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) model of work system and patient safety, which provides a framework for understanding the structures, processes and outcomes in health care and their relationships, can be used toward these ends. An application of the SEIPS model in one particular care setting (outpatient surgery) is presented and other practical and research applications of the model are described.
-
Content ArticleOver the last 20 years, the Royal College of Art has been a fierce proponent of the role of design to improve and save lives, leading the debate on the efficacy of design thinking when applied to real societal needs. Nowhere is this better exemplified than by its impact on healthcare and patient safety. With increasing pressure on the national healthcare system, public services and provisions have to meet ever more stringent financial, resource and efficiency objectives. The Royal College of Art has demonstrated how systems-led thinking and a design approach to understanding the user’s needs can effectively reduce infection and medical error, and improve treatment spaces and patient communication.
