Proactive, Transdisciplinary Safer-System Redesign. A Field Report from the Hospital Frontline

Ergonomics and Human Factors in Healthcare System Design – An Introduction to This Special Issue

“…(1) tools and technologies (Milloy & Bubric, 2018;Weiler et al, 2018); (2) tasks (Bargal et al, 2018;Doss et al, 2018;MacDonald & Keir, 2018;Xie et al, 2018); (3) the physical environment (Arsenault-Knudsen et al, 2018;Weiler et al, 2018); and (4) organizational structures (Arsenault-Knudsen et al, 2018;Bargal et al, 2018;Ibrahim Shire, Thomas Jun, & Robinson, 2018;Podtschaske, Salazar, & Rao, 2018). Importantly, diverse areas of study within human factors and ergonomics (perception, cognition, physical ergonomics, organizational ergonomics) are considered within these papers and most papers address more than one area.…”

“…Four papers applied a systems approach to the improvement of various parts of complex healthcare systems through the use of multidisciplinary teams including human factors, safety science, and systems engineering experts (Bargal et al, 2018;Benda et al, 2018;Ibrahim Shire et al, 2018;Podtschaske et al, 2018). Podtschaske et al (2018) demonstrated how a human-centered design approach can be applied successfully at the organizational level in one US healthcare system. Their paper highlights the importance of running a program encompassing multiple models, methods, and stakeholders.…”