Wolf, Laurie

This discussion panel will focus on solutions for mitigating the negative impact of interruptions in healthcare. Five human factors practitioners who work within healthcare systems will present solutions of mitigating the negative impact of interruptions on safety and quality with the acknowledgement that interruptions in and of themselves should not be viewed as purely negative (i.e. some interruptions are not only necessary but beneficial to patient care). Additionally, one panelist will focus on the difficulties in bridging the gap between research and practice in this arena. The session will lead to an interactive discussion about how human factors methods can be adapted and applied to identify and develop realistic, impactful solutions that improve safety by eliminating the negative impact of interruptions in applied healthcare settings.

Healthcare workers suffer musculoskeletal disorders at rates that exceed most other industries. Despite this, many healthcare facilities do not follow best practices that are proven to reduce risk of injury. This discussion panel will explore the reasons for why the healthcare industry struggles to prevent injuries and will outline successful strategies for protecting workers. The panelists are leaders and advisors for large medical systems and their specialties include ergonomics, safe patient handling, and patient safety. The panelists relate the critical challenges faced when preventing caregiver injuries. Such challenges include underreporting of staff injuries, lack of funding or administrative support, and inability to sell the connections among caregiver safety, caregiver productivity, and patient safety. The panelists also share success stories of when they have achieved positive change and explain the strategies that were effective. Practitioners should gain new insights for implementing successful change, and researchers will be exposed to new and important research questions.

This session will focus on lessons learned when developing solutions for real world problems in healthcare. Human factors (HF) practitioners bring unique knowledge, methods, and perspectives to work with clinicians to address numerous defects in the worksystem but require problem-solving skills that focus on solutions. The HF contribution may be in the area of process improvement (e.g., prevention of patient falls), systems design (e.g., designing crashcart), or identification of design flaws so robust intervention may be deployed (e.g., glucose meters). Six human factors practitioners who work within healthcare systems will present real world challenges which were discovered by HF methods, or which have heavy HF implications, but where direct HF influence on design lead to the ultimate effective solution. The session will be designed to lead to a discussion about how HF methods were adapted to individual problems at hand and to focus on developing solutions.