NHS 10 Year Plan

The Clinical Human Factors Group (CHFG) exists to ensure that healthcare systems are designed around the reality of care, and the abilities and limitations of human beings. Our central aim is  to create safer environments, and ensure that episodes of preventable patient harm are neither repeated nor ignored.

The NHS 10-Year Health Plan (“Fit for the Future”)  is certainly ambitious. Its recognition of the pressures on staff, the growing inequities in access and outcomes, and the urgent need to bring care closer to home, is timely and welcome. The emphasis on prevention, digital transformation, and tackling inequalities provides strategic direction with the potential to improve population health, while also supporting a more sustainable NHS.

While we support the scale of its ambition, we believe the Plan should go much further to ensure that patient safety and human factors  become foundational rather than optional features of reform.

The plan fails to acknowledge patient safety as a core organising principle. It ignores the role of human factors in design and implementation, which would be central to similar initiatives in any other safety-critical industry. It is our founding belief that Human Factors has the capability to improve safety in healthcare, as it does in other safety-critical industries, and indeed as recognised in the Patient Safety Concordat and in Chartered Institute of Human Factors and Ergonomics White Paper in Health and Social Care. These elements are crucial, and absent.

The Plan sets goals but is less developed on delivery. Experience shows that the roll-out of innovations and system changes often falters without rigorous attention to usability, design, and testing.  Engaging Human Factors expertise from the outset will reduce wasted effort, improve adoption, and ensure that transformation is not only ambitious but also safe, efficient, and lasting.

We will continue to use our influence to ensure HF principles and expertise are incorporated into the future of healthcare

We are running an interactive roundtable on Friday 7th November at 10.30am to explore how human factors can help turn the plans vision in to change. Details below: