Human Factors in Healthcare : A Field Guide to Continuous Improvement

Have you ever experienced the burden of an adverse event or a near-miss in healthcare and wished there was a way to mitigate it? This book walks you through a classic adverse event as a case study and shows you how.

It is a practical guide to continuously improving your healthcare environment, processes, tools, and ultimate outcomes, through the discipline of human factors. Using this book, you as a healthcare professional can improve patient safety and quality of care.

Adverse events are a major concern in healthcare today. As the complexity of healthcare increases-with technological advances and information overload-the field of human factors offers practical approaches to understand the situation, mitigate risk, and improve outcomes.

The first part of this book presents a human factors conceptual framework, and the second part offers a systematic, pragmatic approach. Both the framework and the approach are employed to analyze and understand healthcare situations, both proactively-for constant improvement-and reactively-learning from adverse events.

This book guides healthcare professionals through the process of mapping the environmental and human factors; assessing them in relation to the tasks each person performs; recognizing how gaps in the fit between human capabilities and the demands of the task in the environment have a ripple effect that increases risk; and drawing conclusions about what types of changes facilitate improvement and mitigate risk, thereby contributing to improved healthcare outcomes.

Avi Parush is an associate professor at the Industrial Engineering and Management Faculty, The Israel Institute of Technology, and an emeritus professor from the psychology department of Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. With over 30 years of practice and research in human factors, HCI, and usability, Avi devoted his career to influencing the design of workplaces and the tools people use to make their lives easier, safer, and more beneficial. His current research focuses on teamwork in complex and critical situations in healthcare, first-response and other domains, and simulation-based training with a focus on team training. He is the emeritus founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Usability Studies, and is currently on the editorial board of the Human Factors Journal.