Leadership for Quality Effectiveness and Safety in Health Care

RUNNING HEAD: LEADERSHIP FOR QUALITY EFFECTIVENESS AND SAFETY IN HEALTHCARE 1
Leadership for Quality Effectiveness and Safety in Health Care
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LEADERSHIP FOR QUALITY EFFECTIVENESS AND SAFETY IN HEALTHCARE 2
Leadership for Quality Effectiveness and Safety in Health Care
INTRODUCTION
Human factors is the study of how human beings behave either physically or
psychologically in relation to certain environments, products or services. Human factors can
assist in ensuring that healthcare provided to the provided to the patients is safe, effective and
efficient. According to the International Ergonomics Association, human factors in healthcare is
a discipline whose objective is to understand the link between human beings and other elements
of different systems. It also deals with different concepts that can be designed to optimize human
well-being and overall system performance. Human factors in healthcare can define or can
determine the safety of healthcare and therefore all the healthcare workers should attempt to
explore this discipline for the benefits of the patients. The aim of this assignment is to critically
appraise the literature surrounding human factors that are related to work performance and to
critically analyze the relationship between the human factors and the quality and safety in
healthcare.
BODY
There are different human factors that defines safety in healthcare. One of the most
important human factors is leadership. Leadership is the ability to lead and organize and other
employees or workers towards a common objective. Leadership can be used to ensure safety in
healthcare especially the transformational leadership style that motivates employees and
advocates for communication across the healthcare organization.
Knowledge and skills are other important human factors that can be used to ensure safety
in healthcare. Healthcare workers should be equipped with safety practices when they handle

LEADERSHIP FOR QUALITY EFFECTIVENESS AND SAFETY IN HEALTHCARE 3
different patients. The healthcare curriculum should therefore focus on teaching safety practices
(Xie & Carayon, 2013). Other notable human factors include technology and the outcomes of
interacting with the healthcare environment such as fatigue and stress.
The main interest of human factors is the way they interact with jobs, technology and the
environment as well so as to comprehend and evaluate these interactions. The objective of
human factors is mainly to maximize efficiency of human as well as system efficiency,
effectiveness and healthcare safety (Wilson, 2014). In healthcare, the human factors can be used
as tools to design different procedures that can make it easier for healthcare workers to carry out
their duties perfectly. Human factors can be used to give guidelines on how safe prescribing
practices can be used to ensure patient safety.
Relationship between human factors and healthcare safety
There have been cases of mistakes when healthcare workers are offering care or medical
interventions to patients. This has in return led to mortality or even transmission of chronic
conditions from one patient to another (Sirriyeh, Lawton, Gardner, & Armitage, 2010). This
therefor calls for patient safety to reduce such cases. This can be possible if the healthcare
workers can always be aware of situations that can increase the chances of errors or mistakes for
patients in any given situation. Different studies have established that the source of errors is from
human factors which can be easily prevented (Weaver et al., 2010). There are different human
factors that can influence the performance and this might subject them to errors. The two most
common human factors in this case are fatigue and stress. Scientists have strongly linked fatigue
and low performance and this subjects the patients to risk factors. The same studies have found
out that long working hours leads to low performance just the same way an individual with a
blood alcohol content of 0.05 mmol/l (Werner, Gurses, Leff, & Arbaje, 2016). This is the level