Rich Holden (SEIPS 2.0) and Pascale Carayon (SEIPS, SEIPS 3.0) created SEIPS 101 and seven simple, practical systems engineering tools especially for frontline healthcare quality and safety professionals. Great for novices, clinicians, execs, students, and the systems-curious.
The patient journey represents patient interactions with multiple health care contexts and is composed of many local work systems embedded in interconnected care settings.
Improving safety in the patient journey poses challenges for HFE, e.g. genuine participation of multiple stakeholders.
Within healthcare there has been some misconceptions that people hold about what human factors is and its purpose. Russ, Fairbanks, Karsh, Militello, Saleem and Wears have a wonderfully written article that addresses these perceptions and is a must read for healthcare professionals engaging in human factors for the first time.
This paper presents a theoretical model of situation awareness based on its role in human decision making. Situation awareness is presented as a predominant concern in system operation, based on a descriptive view of decision making. The relationship between situation awareness and numerous individual and environmental factors is explored within this article. Among these factors, attention and working memory are presented as critical factors limiting operators from acquiring and interpreting information from the environment to form situation awareness.
In the last two decades, electronic health records (EHRs) have significantly impacted how the U.S. medical system provides health care and manages medical data. Many EHRs were not designed with a clear understanding of clinical workflow and health care environments. Human factors science studies the way humans interact with the world to continually improve that system.
SEIPS or Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety is all about a system focus! Any cursory reading into Human Factors and Ergonomics will quickly establish the emphasis on systems. However, this is the first of two important articles explaining how best to apply a system view of safety within healthcare. This article is a little heavy reading but it does highlight a core value of human factors and ergonomics – systems.
This is one of the original articles addressing the measurement of situation awareness within the hospital setting.
Another concept that is gaining interest within healthcare is situation awareness. This article explores hospital administration and frontline staff perspectives on the advantages and difficulties of implementing a tiered situational awareness huddle system. Their proposed model is exploring the useful ways in which situational awareness huddles may reduce patient harm.
In this article, researchers designed a system to identify, mitigate, and escalate patient safety risk through the use of high-reliability organizational principles.
This article argues that it is possible to breakdown what teams researchers have learned about teamwork into five core components. These components are now referred to as the “Big Five” core concepts within teamwork. The "Big Five" include 1) team leadership, 2) mutual performance monitoring, 3) backup behavior, 4) adaptability, and 5) team orientation.
The science of Human Factors has historically been involved with safety. From Reason’s Swiss Cheese Model to newer perspectives on safety, human factors professionals apply these principles in multiple industries to improve systems. This paper discusses the evolving ideas of ‘safety,’ with comparisons between Safety-I and Safety-II.
This article is a comparison of the traditional error/risk assessment and the emerging ideas of resilience engineering.
This article highlights some of the key discoveries and developments in the area of team performance over the past 50 years, especially with relation to Human Factors.