Nursing Assignment | Human Factors and Patient Safety

Running head: HUMAN FACTORS AND PATIENT SAFETY
HUMAN FACTORS AND PATIENT SAFETY
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

1
HUMAN FACTORS AND PATIENT SAFETY
Human factors which are also referred as ergonomics can be explained as the established
scientific discipline which is followed by healthcare professionals in their practices in order to
maintain safety in their working fields. These mainly remain concerned with safety and quality
improvement procedures along with integrated offerings, evidence and coherent approaches in
different patient’s safety maintenance and helps in achieving clinical excellence. According to
famous human expert researcher Catchpole, 2011, human factor can be defined as the
“Enhancing clinical performance through an understanding of the effects of teamwork, tasks,
equipment, workspace, culture, organization on human behaviour and abilities, and application
of that knowledge in clinical settings.”
The different principles of human factors mainly fix their focus on the optimization of the human
performances mainly by developing a more polished understanding of the behaviors of different
individuals and also concerns with their interactions with each other’s and also with their
environment. By implementation of different initiatives regarding maintenance of patient safety,
they also try to minimize and also mitigate the different human frailties thereby reducing various
medical errors and its consequences. Human factor principles are seen to identify and thereby
asses and manage the patient safety risks. These are also helpful for conducting analysis of the
different incidents which are useful in identifying the different learning and corrective actions.
Understanding of the different principles and techniques are indeed important in different teams
and services and also for supporting change management systems (Sirriyeh et al., 2010). They
also help to emphasize the different importance of the design of the equipments along with their
process an procedures.
Human factors also portray importance to the inter-relationships between the humans, tools and
also different equipments by which are used in the workplace and also the environment where

2
HUMAN FACTORS AND PATIENT SAFETY
people work. Human beings are not machines and therefore they are fallible and in these cases
better the human factors principles and knowledge are grasped by individually, better will be the
quality of care they provide. Researchers have stated that in different ways, it can maintain safety
and efficiency by maintaining proper order medications, correct hand off of information,
properly moving patients, following chart medications and orders electronically. Another very
important prospect of the human factor is the incorporations of the human –machine interaction
besides the human-human interactions (Crayon et al., 2014). Human factor engineering has been
found to be helpful in identifying as well as promoting the best fit between the different people
as well as the world within which human live and work. This may include the development of
relationship between technologies as well as the physical design features in the different work
environments. Often different tasks require designing of solutions which implement proper
software including computer order entry systems and different hardware like pumps. It also
comprises of usage of different tools like scalpels, patient beds, syringes and others along with
the physical layout which includes lighting of the work environments and others(Karsh et al.,
2006). It is stated that this proper balance of these interrelationships are extremely important as
researchers are of the opinion that technological revolutions in healthcare has been intricately
associated with relevance of human factors in factors. This is said so as potential of harm
become greater when technology is mishandled. Therefore proper handling of the equipments
and tools should be one of the most important criteria that should be administered by the
professionals for better results.
Healthcare specialties which are founded on proper human factor principles help in a large
number of arenas. This involves the reduction of harm by implementing proper design of
different healthcare systems and equipments. It also involves the understanding of the facts about

3
HUMAN FACTORS AND PATIENT SAFETY
how healthcare staffs make different types of errors and how different system factors happen to
threaten different patient safety. Besides, helping in correction of actions, it also helps in
improving the safety culture of teams as well as different organizations. Moreover it also helps in
enhancing different teamwork along with the improvement of communication between different
healthcare staffs. Moreover evaluation future predictions about what can go wrong and using
such assumptions in the modern day to design new hospitals and other healthcare sectors
(Reason, 2012). This may happen through the application of different cognitive task analysis,
prospective risk assessment tools, workload assessments and others.
At the individual level, two important domains need to be discussed. The first is the presence of
the cognitive skills which involves two important components. These are situation awareness and
decision making. The second domain is the personal resources domains which involves two
components which are stress and fatigue. Developing the skills of situation awareness is very
important as it helps the professional to monitor the different occurrences in the task
environment so that he can understand about what is taking place currently in the environment
and also farsighted about what can happen in next moments . This skill is extremely important
for professionals so that they can take initiatives to prevent any negative adverse effects which if
taken precaution can be avoided. Failure in the maintenance of situation awareness in associated
with different accidents that can prove fatal for the career of the staffs (Reason, 2012). Situation
awareness also extends to share understanding of the task and team level which is very important
for overlap development of team performance. Proper decision making is very important as it is a
critical indicator for maintaining workplace safety which helps in reduction of errors (Xie et al.,
2015). This mainly involves the incorporation of two important steps that assure proper decision
making skills. The first one mainly involves the diagnosing the situation mainly portraying