News and presentations from today's Human Factors conference, chaired by Prof Debbie Rosenorn-Lanng
Director of Simulation and Human Factors Royal Berkshire Hospital NHS Trust.
Integrating Human Factors into Health and Social Care
Emma Crumpton Chartered Ergonomist and Physiotherapist
System Concepts Ltd
• how Human Factors can and should influence how we work in health and social care
• ensuring Human Factors are integral to how we investigate patient safety incidents, design our protocols and guidelines, and improve the work environment and technologies on which we rely to care for patients safely and effectively
• Human Factors: responding to Covid-19
• case studies and examples
EXTENDED SESSION: Training and Educating frontline staff in Human Factors
Dr Sarah Noble Consultant in Emergency Medicine & Associate Medical Director (QI) Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Programme Lead for Patient Safety First, HEE Wessex
• embedding human factors in training for frontline staff and improvement projects
• the importance of a human factors programme
• introducing a systems perspective to frontline staff
• training and educating frontline staff
Sarah shared an example of their regional patient safety training programme, which involves group traing days leading to patient safety projects and a conference. She said they start by looking at what is risk, what tends to cause incidents, recognising that it's not usually about one individual but problems involving systems, human interactions, equipment, environment and personal. In the training they look at a clinical example, compiling a timeline of what happened and identifying the Human Factors at points on the timeline that led to the incident. They then move on to group exercises looking at possible quality improvement projects based on their speciality. All the projects are hosted on a web based educational tool - www.healtheducationwessexprojects.org.uk - where they are marked based on aim, intervention, engagements, outcomes, sustainability, and transferability. Sarah said this helps to inspire trainees so they can see what's gone before and it's good for seeing themes in the projects e.g. there were a lot this year on equipment. Sarah said they have found this training is a great patient centred grass roots approach, it's an holisitic approach to delivering quality care and their is potential for reporting to inform education and improvement which is not entirely tapped yet.