Human Factors Hub

Welcome!
Hello everyone and welcome to the 2^nd e-Newsletter from Scotland’s Human Factors Network for Health & Social Care. 

To join our Network please email: humanfactors@nes.scot.nhs.uk

You can follow us on Twitter: @HFhealthcareUK 

What are Our Goals?

• To raise awareness of how Human Factors approaches (Box 1) can add value to optimising the design and delivery of health and care services.
• To modernise how safety and risk are understood and controlled in highly complex health and care organisations.
• To build workforce capacity and capability at all levels in basic Human Factors thinking and methods
• To support students, clinical, science and engineering trainees and faculty to better understand Human Factors and demonstrate how it can be embedded in training curricula and educational programmes
• To campaign for national policy and resource allocation to support Human Factors integration across priority areas (e.g. education and training, procurement, learning from safety occurrences, safe digital IT, built environment), including embedding qualified specialists in health and care organisations.

Who are We?

The network membership is quickly growing in size due to the strong interest in Human Factors across:

• Health and Care Organisations,
• Royal Colleges and Professional Bodies,
• Healthcare Regulators, 
• Clinical Practitioners,
• Academics, Researchers and Educators at all levels;
• Safety, Risk, Governance, and Improvement Advisors and Leaders;
• Biomedical Engineers and Scientists,
• Estates Services Staff, Building and Architect Professionals
• Supervisors, Managers and Leaders
• Executive Teams and Board Members

Our September 2023 Meeting

At our most recent network meeting we heard from a range of experts in the field who described their experiences of applying Human Factors concepts and methods to better understand care system safety to design related improvement interventions:

You can find the programme and presentations from the day here Human Factors and Ergonomics Symposiums | Turas | Learn (nhs.scot)

• To kick off, Simon Paterson-Brown and Paul Bowie welcomed everyone to the College, outlined the packed programme ahead and explained the purpose and goals of the national Network.
• First up, Dr Laura Pickup, Head of Human Factors at University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust, described her fascinating experiences of being one of only a handful of truly embedded professionals currently working in the NHS. 
  • Laura outlined her involvement in inter-disciplinary work across her organisation on a whole range of thorny issues impacting on system performance and the wellbeing of patients/staff. 
  • She made clear how a Human Factors approach brings a totally different but complementary perspective to understanding the hugely complex nature of these issues, and how this informs the design of novel solutions that always puts people at the centre of the improvement process.  
• Next up, Barbara Nugent, formerly a Superintendent Radiographer at NHS Lothian and NES Clinical Fellow, spoke about the potentially (extremely) hazardous nature of the MRI clinical environment for patients and staff.  She outlined how a NES-supported Human Factors research study uncovered multiple system-wide issues impacting on the safe design of these environments.  This led to various recommendations for improving the safety of the screening environment and the overall design of the working environment to reduce risks, many of which have been enacted on a UK basis.   
• Dr Alastair Ross, Associate Professor of Human Factors at Staffordshire University, spoke about the relatively recent emergence of the Resilient Healthcare discipline and the linked notions of Safety-I (how we largely focus on counting, analysing and learning from past safety incidents) and Safety-II (the largely untapped potential to learn from normal everyday work and success)
• To close the morning off, Dr Neil Spenceley (NHSGGC) gave an excellent talk on managing the unexpected in Paediatrics, touching on the critical importance of patient engagement, building a psychologically safe working environment for staff , and effective teamworking to support performance and wellbeing.
• In the afternoon, delegates participated in a session led by Paul Bowie and Al Ross on the first stage of building consensus on System Thinking principles to inform health and care safety learning. 
• NES faculty (Suzanne Anderson-Stirling, Ian Davidson and Mark Johnston) also updated the network on:
  • Educational resources to support building Workforce Capacity & Capability in Human Factors
  • Curricula development for safety investigators and learning reviewers
• Finally, Dr Laura Pickup rounded off the day by defining and explaining the drivers of fatigue in healthcare and comparing and contrasting how this significant risk to safe care is understood and managed in other safety-critical industries.

• Human Factors (also known as Ergonomics) is a science discipline and profession that seeks to jointly improve the performance of organisational systems and the wellbeing of people who use and work in these systems. 
• The Human Factors approach seeks to make things (job tasks, guidance and policies, technology, work systems, physical environments) easier, more efficient, and safer to use.
• You can also visit the website of the UK professional body (Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors; CIEHF)

And the Clinical Human Factors Group (a charity looking to campaign for change in the NHS)

Our Next Meeting

Our next 1-day network and symposium meeting is provisionally scheduled for Friday 9th February 2023 at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh (please email humanfactors@nes.scot.nhs.uk to secure a place - programme for the day to follow).  Topics to be covered on the day include:

• Healthcare Human Factors in the ‘Real World’
• Human Factors in General Medical Practice
• The Human-Centred Design of Work Procedures
• Building Consensus on Systems Thinking Principles for Organisational Safety
• A Preliminary Blueprint for Building Workforce Capacity and Capability in Human Factors in Health and Care.