Patient safety and human factors: human factors - interventions

There are a growing number of interventions that can help:

• raise awareness about patient safety issues
• increase staff capability to learn from and anticipate error
• encourage staff to share safety concerns
• improve work processes such as communications.

This site will draw attention to these tools. Most of these are readily available (Flin 2009). This is a fast moving area and tools are still emerging that have the potential to reduce risk and improve safety. We will remain alert to innovations of this type and share where possible, descriptions of these interventions in action.
 
We have focused on the following areas and have aligned tools to these areas:

• communication
• leadership
• safety culture
• stress and fatigue
• teamwork
• work environment

We have also created a list of all the tools and interventions referred to in this resource and where the information about them can be found - see Index to tools and interventions used in this resource.

BBC 2 Horizon: How to avoid mistakes in surgery

BBC 2 Horizon screened a programme on Thursday 21 March at 9.00pm about human factors in health care. The programme, presented by Dr Kevin Fong looked at how learning about the human in the system and the system itself can bring about enormous improvements in safety and outcomes that technology and medical science aspire to. The programme used a tragic death to highlight human factors that all of us are prone to, and looked at how we can learn from others both in and outside healthcare to make a real difference in the future. For more information see: How to avoid mistakes in surgery.

References

These resources were last accessed on 25 March 2013. Some of them are in PDF format - see how to access PDF files.

Flin R et al (2009) Human factors in patient safety: review of topic and tools. Report for Methods and Measures Working Group of WHO Patient Safety (PDF 424KB), Geneva: World Health Organization.

Beaumont K and Russell J (2012) Standardising for reliability: the contribution of tools and checklists, Nursing Standard, 26(34) 25 Apr-1 May, pp.35-39 (PDF 771.7KB).