Human Factors in Healthcare Blog

In my last posting, I began a thread about how to hire someone for a human factors engineering and design/safety job.  These were the five jobs that contained attributes helpful for an HFE and Medicine specialist:

1. Bartender
2. Bean-packing plant safety manager
3. Lifeguard
4. Set designer
5. Wilderness survival expert

In his many years at a green bean packing plant, my uncle had a large role in worker safety.  Sure, there were some efforts that were typical (XX days since finger has been sliced off), and some that went askew (200 winter coats emblazoned with the misspelled slogan “Saftey First!”  However, many efforts involved involvement…  No, that’s not double talk.

It means that  they closed the plant down one or more days per year and everyone in the plant met to talk about injuries and ways to prevent them.  Everyone, meant that they hired temps to cover reception.  The supervisors had the job of safety and had to weave the lessons they learned in these “retreats”…it meant they needed skills and patience to translate the lessons into concrete actions and expectation.  It meant they needed to be flexible enough to weave stories of caution with verbal “kicks in the butt” to keep summer workers from loafing.  Knowing the goal of the plant is clean, tasty food that is packed quickly and as efficiently as possible…and knowing that one finger tip that a consumer finds in a can will be on the nightly news for 9 weeks (maybe even a “60 Minutes” Special!).

Humor surely helps.  Softening the harshness of zero tolerance for not wearing hard hats is an art.  A person needs good timing of when to tell the story of the temp worker who was nearly boiled when they bypassed the safety system  Knowing when to get real and when to be one of the gang is a balancing act. 

All of these seemingly “natural” skills aren’t.  If you find an HFE & Medicine candidate who has some or most of them, HIRE THEM ON THE SPOT.

Next Posting:  Lifeguard skills – how to disarm a drowning man!