Presentation
Building Safety in Healthcare - Empowering Clinical Teams With Principle-Based Human Factors Approaches
DescriptionRecently, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the Patient Safety Structural Measures (PSSM) that encourages health systems to establish operational structures and culture that prioritize safety. One of the components of the PSSM is to incorporate human factors engineering expertise into patient safety interventions. This can be a challenge to hospitals and care sites that are resource constrained or may not have access to human factors professionals.
At Intermountain Health, we have developed an education and mentoring program that is based on principles from human factors engineering and ecological psychology. This education and practice program aims to equip local hospital and care site leadership with the knowledge and mentored experience necessary to solve health care problems from a human factors lens. By utilizing principles from ecological psychology and mentoring leadership and care teams to this approach, participants learn the importance of the relationship between the environment of the workspace (including physical, digital, social, and cultural) and the behaviors of care teams. The end-goal of this program is to promote caregiver’ insight into ways that clinical workspaces can be improved to ensure better awareness, clinical performance, and satisfaction with clinical work.
To date, we have educated over 112 caregivers including members from our Continuous Improvement, Clinical Risk and Safety Managers, and Clinical Excellence/Quality/Safety Leaders; and are in the process to expand this education to nurses and clinician leaders throughout our 33-hospital system. We have had opportunities to apply these concepts in high-risk settings (Operating rooms, anesthesia workflows, medication errors, Electronic Medical Records and patient-controlled analgesia pumps).
The PSSM provides an excellent opportunity to engage care teams with the importance and opportunities provided by human factors engineering. This additional content augments the existing safety and improvement programs already in place and we believe, with the appropriate education and mentorship, clinical teams can effectively apply human factors engineering and ecological psychology to enhance the safety, efficiency, and satisfaction of clinical work.
At Intermountain Health, we have developed an education and mentoring program that is based on principles from human factors engineering and ecological psychology. This education and practice program aims to equip local hospital and care site leadership with the knowledge and mentored experience necessary to solve health care problems from a human factors lens. By utilizing principles from ecological psychology and mentoring leadership and care teams to this approach, participants learn the importance of the relationship between the environment of the workspace (including physical, digital, social, and cultural) and the behaviors of care teams. The end-goal of this program is to promote caregiver’ insight into ways that clinical workspaces can be improved to ensure better awareness, clinical performance, and satisfaction with clinical work.
To date, we have educated over 112 caregivers including members from our Continuous Improvement, Clinical Risk and Safety Managers, and Clinical Excellence/Quality/Safety Leaders; and are in the process to expand this education to nurses and clinician leaders throughout our 33-hospital system. We have had opportunities to apply these concepts in high-risk settings (Operating rooms, anesthesia workflows, medication errors, Electronic Medical Records and patient-controlled analgesia pumps).
The PSSM provides an excellent opportunity to engage care teams with the importance and opportunities provided by human factors engineering. This additional content augments the existing safety and improvement programs already in place and we believe, with the appropriate education and mentorship, clinical teams can effectively apply human factors engineering and ecological psychology to enhance the safety, efficiency, and satisfaction of clinical work.
Event Type
Oral Presentations
TimeWednesday, March 2511:00am - 11:30am EDT
LocationMurray Hill East
Patient Safety Research and Initiatives