Human Factors in Healthcare Blog

In the past two weeks, I was honered to be invited to two healthcare conferences to talk about human factors engineering (HFE) and patient safety.  The locations and organizations were quite different, but the content I provided was nearly the same.  In New Orleans, I was on a patient safety panel with Bob Wears at the International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare.  In Toronto, I was a presenter at the Canadian Society of Hospital Pharmacists (my slides can be viewed on their web site).

I was able to fly home from New Orleans before the big East Coast Storm…  But, I had to stay an extra day in Toronto to wait for the 6-12 inches of Midwestern snow storm to be plowed.  In New Orleans, I re-learned that I like the sound of the word “Gumbo” more than the taste. In Toronto, I learned that the goat in Jamaican “Goat Roti” tastes just like you would think that goat tastes! 

The other common theme besides interesting food was the questions about HFE.  In fact, these difficult-to-answer questions are common enough that I expect them and have written about them:

1. How can we use these ideas and tools in our job settings?
2. Where do we start?
3. Can we do this ourselves, or is it worth it to hire someone?

Q:  How do we use these ideas/tools?  A: The main targets I tell them about fall into two categories:  a) fix the stuff you are stuck with; and b) don’t buy stuff that you will need to fix.  This answer sits pretty well with most folks.  They see the training, re-training, post-market modifications, work-arounds, and other marginal attempts to deal with devices and tools that are hard to use or error-prone.  They want more systematic ways to find and address HFE flaws in the stuff they are stuck with.

They know, in general, that they should not buy stuff that needs to be fixed, but the pathway to do this is much murkier.  Shouldn’t FDA do this for us?  Shouldn’t our biomedical engineers know?  Why would someone build a widget with known HFE issues in the first place?  This is right about the time that I say, “does anyone have any easier questions!?”

Q: Where to get started?  A: there are many places to get started.  Laura and I get this question enough times that we came up with a list of nine ways to get started, and put the list in our new book…  Then, we thought we could expand on the list, and wrote an article for a HFE special issue of Biomedical Intrumentation and Technology.  In future Blogs, you will see excerpts from this list pop up.

Q: Do this oursevles?  Hire someone?  A: “Yes”, is the short answer.  The much longer answer is in our book we recently wrote and edited.  It contains 6 stories (case studies) from around the US and Canada about hospitals that are doing it themselves or had hired HFEs.  The book has recently been reviewed in a couple of venues, and we will make comment in the next Blog entry.