The Q community welcomed colleagues from Patient Safety and Human Factors & Ergonomics in a workshop presented by the Clinical Human Factors Group in collaboration with the Health Foundation.
Nikki Davey (Qi member & Charity Trustee) presented a timeline for four sciences prevalent in patient safety emerged. Surprisingly an inverse timeline emerged for the group with a third coming to human factors later in their journey (despite it being the oldest).
With a run-through definitions of the sciences led by our Charity Trustee Patrick Waterson (Loughborough Design School and tutor to many in the room!) and tools of the trade – an exercise showed that many in the group were regular users of both QI and Human Factors tools with Emotional Mapping & System Linkage the most popular in QI. For Human Factors effort was concentrated around the most accessible data collection tools for – observations and interviews.

There’s lots of activity all with the common goal of improving patient safety. Nikki presented the ‘Shared Care Record’- a project to reduce emergency admissions by reducing falls. And our guest speaker Jane O’Hara (Bradford Institute for Health Research) presented the Partners in Care Transitions (PACT).
From the floor were reports of activity to address wrong side surgery, a ‘usability group’ tackling poor design and implementation of an Electronic Patient record system, look alike and sound alike medication packaging, implementation of the Theatre Cap Challenge to improve team communication, work with national procurement to use Human Factors and discussion of reports published by the Healthcare Safety Investigation Board (HSIB).

Alistair Williamson – Clinician, trained in both Human Factors and Qi reflected on the changes in healthcare he’s experienced as Qi developed and Human Factors emerged.
So would it be possible to agree an overarching aim for the Q Community to align or integrate Human factors in our pursuit of improving patient safety?

Quotes from the day

“Introducing a continuous process of improvement in patient safety, staff wellbeing, and system performance”

“Developing a network of practitioners, integrating human factors into the values that quality improvement delivers improving patient safety and staff wellbeing.

Pledges to action

  • I will aim to understand user experience and procurement better in my Trust
  • Find out about Usability Assessments
  • Find out about SEIPS model
  • Learn about Demings System Linkage to medicines
  • Read about HF analysis and classification and how it can be used in serious incidents
  • Understanding system linkages better
  • Investigate emotional mapping
  • Test how staff in surgery feel about the Theatre Cap challenge
  • Understanding of what a system is in simple language
  • Try to link HF and QI in clinical skills discussions
  • Seek clarity over system levels and relationships