Leadership For Quality Effectiveness And Safety In Health Care

Identification of human factors related to work performance

Discuss about the Leadership for Quality Effectiveness and Safety in Health Care.

This report emphasizes on the evaluation of the relationship exist between work performance, human factors and quality and safety in healthcare. There are different healthcare systems are designed by the organizations for the purpose of meeting different needs of the patients to improve the quality of care and safety of patients. Human resources play a significant role in improving the processes of nursing. It is essential for the organizations to develop effective communication platform in order to clarify the information related to the roles and responsibilities carried out by doctors and nurses in hospitals.

Human factors are considered important for the management of systems and process design as it helps in development of the required capabilities in the workforce. Nowadays, healthcare organizations focus on human factors as they facilitates in development of different strategies for improving patient safety. The biggest challenge faced by healthcare institutions is maintaining and developing patient safety by delivering quality care services to the patients. The thesis statement is that there is an existence of the significant relationship between human factors, work performance and quality and patient safety in healthcare that helps in fostering safe and positive work culture in the organization.

In relation to this, Fryer (n.d.) stated that human factors are considered as an important process design which helps in building capabilities and limitations of workforce. There is a need of human factor design in the nursing profession as there are various challenges that are faced by nursing profession. For the purpose of mitigating such challenges like unmonitored workloads which is associated with the scope and role of a nurse in a direct or indirect manner, human factor design is appropriate. Human factor emphasis on the analysis of the properties of the human being capability and limitation for the purpose on engineering elements like development, distribution, application design and categorization of services and systems. This helps in improving the quality, safety and operational performance of the organization.

In the views of Cafazzo and Cyr (2012), there is an increasing the trend of human factors engineering in the healthcare which improves safety and efficiency. The strategies related to behavior change helps in improving the performance of employees in order to ensure patient safety in the hospitals. Nowadays, different practitioners adopted a systematic approach for the purpose of mitigating the human errors by designing the socio-technical work environment. Along with this, human resources also tend to rely on interventions that results in improving the user performance by the way of providing training to reduce the impact of adverse events. There is also an increased dependency on automation with little intervention of human beings might result in propagate errors in the system in an easy manner.

Critically analyze the relationship between human factors and quality and safety in healthcare

There is a need of human beings for the purpose of making judgments related to the provision of different care services to patients in order to eliminate errors. Human resources in the medical industry uses user centered design for the purpose of creating systems where different prototypes and concepts can employ training for optimization of the design of the system. The other framework is the ecological interface design which is used in the healthcare to design human machine interface for complex systems. This helps in gaining information related to unanticipated conditions occurred that hurdles the patient safety. This framework helps in modernizing the user interface of high risk radiotherapy and detection of cardiovascular risks.

In contrast to this, Patel and Kannampallil (2014) states that the health information systems do not guarantee the safety and care of the patients in the healthcare institutions. The implementation of a HEF helps in the designing of the healthcare systems that has a significant impact on the quality of care and patient safety. This approach helps in improving the performance of the staff members of the healthcare institutions by addressing cognitive and physical limitations. There is a need of establishing a close relationship between the healthcare professions and HIT for the purpose of attaining the success of the systems in the organization. For bringing the improvement in patient safety and quality, HFE has used macro-ergonomic approaches for the prediction of the patient safety and quality of care. The different elements of this approach include joint optimization of human performance and well being, systems oriented approach, organizational and socio-technical context and interactions between various elements of the system. The different macro-ergonomic models are SEIPS model and healthcare professional performance model.

In support of this, Holden, et al. (2013) states that SEIPS is a prevalent healthcare human factors framework that embraces three major human factors principles such as system orientation, person centeredness and design driven improvements. The system orientation emphasizes on the interaction of socio-technical system. This has resulted in replacement of blame the person culture with the holistic system based approach. Along with this, the person centeredness principle states that the human beings are central element of healthcare work system as the work system has to align with the limitations, capabilities and performance needs of the people involved in it. The design driven improvements principle integrates the person centered design and the system in order to get effective and efficient results.

There are six interacting components such as tasks, technologies, tools, internal environment and external environment. The characteristics of these factors include variety, ambiguity, sequence and complexity. It also consists of different tools and technologies that are used by the people to increase their productivity in order to increase the profitability of the healthcare systems. This model provides a hierarchical arrangement of the work system. It also takes into account of engaging healthcare professionals with the work processes in order to attain effective and efficient results. In addition to this, it also engages patients in an active manner for the purpose of improving their safety and quality of care provided to them. For this purpose, there is a need of gaining information related to the symptoms and history of the family to diagnose the diseases in order to provide proper treatment to the patients.

In support of this, Xie and Carayon (2015) state that human factors and ergonomics is considered as a significant approach for improving healthcare processes, and work systems to improve the patient safety and quality of care. The absence of such systems for the purpose of implementing different processes, healthcare technologies, socio-technical systems, workflows, and jobs may lead to the occurrence of different poor quality of care and patient safety incidents like job dissatisfaction, injuries, burnout, turnover, adverse drug events and medication errors. This system helps in addressing different issues related to cognitive, physical and organization such as mismatch between physical characteristics of healthcare professionals and task requirements, limited information for clinical decision making and job stress.

In support of this, Gluyas and Hookham (2016), stated that the staff members and nurses have to manage overloaded information by the use of human factor design which is a automated behavior that has several skills and help nurses to do multi task which results in the occurrence of capture errors. This has resulted in avoiding or neglecting the patient safety in the hospitals. There is an occurrence of various shifts in the hospitals due to which the staff members handed the documents to the staff of next shift after the completion of their shifts which may result in redundancy of the work and negligence over the observations of the patient health and communicate to the authorized person to put attention on the safety of patients by providing high quality of care.

This results in the occurrence of error provoking conditions and leads to the occurrence of lack of adequate monitoring of the patient which might result in the death of the patient. There is an occurrence of different errors such as slips and lapses which influences task, situational and cognitive factors that create active errors that affect the patient. In order to reducing these types of errors, there is a need to provide training to staff members for spreading awareness about human fallibility. This helps in identification of risk factors to develop competence in identification of risk factors (Gluyas and Hookham, 2016).

Carayon et al. (2014) states that there are different human factor systems approaches that helps in improving the patient safety and healthcare quality. This is the system which is successfully applied in the healthcare research. This system helps in balancing the work system and encouraging the active role of workers in improving patient safety and healthcare quality. Besides this, improvement in physical design of a medical device helps in understanding t6he organizational context, where these technologies are used to improve the patient safety and healthcare quality. In addition to this, integration of the work system model i.e. SPO model of Donabedian with the SEIPS model helps in increasing the acceptability of the SEIPS model by the healthcare community. The SEIPS model helps in gaining outcomes related to patient safety and healthcare quality. This model helps in designing work systems that provide benefits to patients and healthcare workers and organizations. There are different HFE applications that helps in reducing the risks related to occupational safety and health of workers like reduction in musculoskeletal disorders of nurses.

In the views of Kaufman and Mc Caughan (2013), organizational culture also plays a significant role in improving the patient safety and healthcare quality in the organization. Implementation of effective leadership in a clinical setting helps providing creation of safer and healthier environments. The nurse leader in the healthcare institutions communicates the information related to the vision of patient centered care and motivates employees to achieve this vision. This can be achieved through role modeling to set the standards for team performance and responding towards the lapses in the patient care. Companies such as NHS uses corporate governance framework for the purpose of improving standards of care. The key elements of safety culture such as leadership and team work results in reducing the failures and creating the environment of trust.

In the views of Gurses, Ozok and Pronovost (2011), HFE considers individuals as an integral part of healthcare systems by focusing on the abilities and limitations to attain optimization of the performance of the overall system. HFE focuses on designing of the user friendly interfaces that improves the performance of the users and reduction in the human error. In order to integrate the human factors in patient safety, there is a need of building the capacity of present and future healthcare providers to understand the HFE. There is a need to create market forces to producing those products which incorporate HFE principles and techniques. There is a need to establish coordination between manufacturers and suppliers in order to create safer products for the healthcare institutions in order to improve patient safety.

Conclusion

It can be concluded that human factor design is used for the purpose of mitigating different challenges faced by nursing professional in improving the patient safety and quality of care. The challenges faced by nursing professionals include unmonitored workloads. In order to improve patient safety and quality of care in the healthcare institutions, different HFE models are implemented that helps in integrating the capabilities of the workforce with the tools and techniques used to carry out different activities. Besides this, there is an active participation of the patients in improving their safety as the healthcare professionals gain information related to the family history and symptoms for the purpose of diagnosing the problem and provide care services to ensure patient safety.

Different HFE systems help in balancing the work system which helps in improving the patient safety in the organization. Along with this, leadership also plays a significant role in improving the efficiencies of the nurses in the organization as it helps in acting as a role model and communicating the information related to the vision to the team members which results in improving the overall productivity of the organization. it is also summarized that the thesis statement is restated as  there is an existence of the significant relationship between human factors, work performance and quality and patient safety in healthcare that helps in fostering safe and positive work culture in the organization.

References

Cafazzo, J.A. & Cyr, O.S. (2012). From discovery to design: the evolution of human factors in healthcare. Healthcare Quarterly 15, 24-29.

Carayona, P., Wetternecka, T.B. Rodriguezd, A.J.R., Hundta, A.S. Hoonakkera, P., Holdene, R. & Gursesf, A.P. (2014). Human factors systems approach to healthcare quality and patient safety. Appl Ergon 45(1), 14-25.

Fryer, L.A. (n.d.). Human factors in nursing: The time is now. Australian Journal of Advanced Nursing 30(2), 56-65.

Gluyas, H. & Hookham, E.M. (2016). Human factors and the death of a child in hospital: a case review. Nursing Standard 30, 46-51.

Gurses, A.P., Ozok, A.A. & Pronovost, P.J. (2011). Time to accelerate integration of human factors and ergonomics in patient safety. BMJ Qual Saf 21,347-351.

Holden, R.J., Carayon, P., Gurses, A.P., Hoonakker, P., Hundt, A.S., Ozok, A.A. & Rodriguez, A.J.R. (2013). SEIPS 2.0: A human factors framework for studying and improving the work of healthcare professionals and patients. Ergonomics 56(11), 1-30.

Kaufman G. & McCaughan, D. (2013). The effect of organizational culture on patient safety. Nursing Standard 27 (43), 50-56.

Patel, V.L. & Kannampallil, T.G. (2014) Human Factors and Health Information Technology: Current Challenges and Future Directions. IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics, 58-66.

Xie, A. & Carayon, P. (2015). A systematic review of human factors and ergonomics (HFE) – based healthcare system redesign for quality of care and patient safety. Ergonomics 58(1), 33-49.