Works system design for patient safety: The SEIPS Model

Most errors and inefficiencies in patient care arise not from the solitary actions of individuals but from conflicting, incomplete, or sub-optimal systems of which they are a part and with which they interact. To improve the design of these systems, the US Institute...

Scoping Review of Human Factors and Ergonomics in Primary Care

Much of the early research and focus in human factors/ergonomics (HF/E) in healthcare has been in the acute sector. This is partly because the early high profile interest has been from people in acute areas learning lessons from other safety-critical industries who...

Investigating for Improvement – building a national safety investigator for Healthcare

This thought paper explores how healthcare systems can develop a system-wide approach to investigating and learning from the most serious patient safety issues, and examines the organisational infrastructure that is needed to support this. Many safety-critical...

Patient Safety Collaboratives

England’s 15 Patient Safety Collaboratives play an essential role in identifying and spreading safer care initiatives from within the NHS and industry, ensuring these are shared and implemented throughout the system. They are based in the 15 Academic Health Science...

Emergency Prompt Cards

How does a consultant confirm all the initial steps in management have been completed? How does the doctor new to the emergency department learn how to deal with a condition they have never managed before? How does the team confirm all the safety critical points for a...

Human Factors in Suicide Prevention

Dr Sangeeta Mahajan, a consultant Anaesthetist, tells her story of how her only son took his own life and her subsequent investigation into what went...