Main description:

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.

Contents:

Background to Human Factors in Healthcare
Part I: A Conceptual Framework
About Human Factors Frameworks
HF-MARC: Using the Human Factors Conceptual Framework to Map-Assess-Recognize-Conclude
Part II: The Human Factors Field Guide
Overview: A Human Factors Approach to Continuous Improvement
Start the Process
Map the Context
Assess Fit
Interim Findings: Problems of Fit
Recognize Emergent Factors
Conclude: Performance and Outcomes
Interventions and Mitigations
This is Not the End
Appendix A: The Detailed Checklist
Appendix B: Fully Analyzed Sepsis Management Scenario
References and Resources
Author Biographies