During this webinar you will hear from experts in Human Factors and Health Psychology on how the marriage of these two disciplines can help to prevent and develop solutions to patient safety challenges in healthcare.

You can look forward to a discussion about the truths and myths surrounding Human Factors in healthcare. Behavioural Science frameworks such as the COM-B model of behaviour will be described and applied to real-life patient safety scenarios. Expert speakers will share their experiences of applying a blend of Human Factors and Behavioural frameworks to gain practical insights for the application to everyday patient care, drawing on Methotrexate prescribing as a case study example.

After viewing this webinar, you will be able to:

• Define the term ‘human factors’ and recognise what human factors is as well as the common misconceptions
• Describe why human factors is important for medication safety
• Combine behavioural science and systems frameworks in real-life patient safety scenarios
• Recognise opportunities for Human Factors interventions in your own practice.

This session will discuss how a systems approach can be used to not only understand why things can go wrong but also to enhance local work practices and assist with work that spans care boundaries. Furthermore, we will discuss the role Human Factors can play to support care transitions.  

Attendees will be signposted to a selection of entry-level Human Factors concepts and tools that they can apply to support more effective and meaningful: 

• design and implementation of SOPs, 
• team learning from safety occurrences and successful everyday work 
• insights into solving everyday work problems, hassles, irritations, and frustrations 
• and exploration of the local team safety culture

This session will explore how healthcare can use systems engineering approaches to design safer systems. Two case studies from the acute care setting will demonstrate the opportunities that this approach brings, and challenges involved. We will consider how to understand if the current system design supports safety and how we can influence design of equipment, environment, and organisational factors to support known risks like LASAs – Look-alike sound-alike medicines.

The session will demonstrate different approaches that you could take to improve the safety of systems and how by choosing the right approach for the situation, sustainable change can be achieved.

Learning Outcomes:

• Recognise that systems engineering can create sustainable change
• Describe how a systems engineering approach could inform safety actions
• Apply different Human Factors tools and outline how they inform organisational decision making and priority setting