A step change in healthcare safety

Marking the inaugural World Patient Safety Day (September 2019), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, said: “No one should be harmed while receiving health鈥痗are. And yet, globally,鈥痑t least鈥痜ive patients鈥痙ie every minute because of unsafe care.”

In a bid to address this alarming statistic, our research is being used to implement systematic changes in occupational wellbeing and patient safety practice worldwide whilst impacting international standards and the design of medical products and facilities.

An EU collaboration followed, investigating the risk factors for patient handling systems – one of the first examples of a Human Factors Ergonomics (HFE) approach to both staff and patient safety. This work underpins, for example, ISO TR 12296 which informs practice worldwide.

We have also examined equipment design (including hospital beds and patient hoists) and healthcare building guidance (spanning a range of acute facility environments). This work – which drew on clinical expertise – now informs international guidance on both products and the optimal safe layout of hospital spaces.

In 2015, we delivered HFE training workshops to healthcare staff across the UK, collecting data about challenges to patient safety, and discovered considerable gaps in healthcare safety systems. This research is supporting the development of national guidance and clinical training whilst influencing an international audience via our dedicated practitioner Hub.

In October 2018, drawing on our expertise, CIEHF launched the white paper - Human Factors for Health & Social Care - which provides guidance around the embedding of sustainable system-level improvements for patients and staff within healthcare settings.