Rethinking healthcare as a safety--critical industry.
The discipline of ergonomics, or human factors engineering, has made substantial contributions to both the development of a science of safety, and to the improvement of safety in a wide variety of hazardous industries, including nuclear power, aviation, shipping, energy extraction and refining, military operations, and finance. It is notable that healthcare, which in most advanced societies is a substantial sector of the economy (eg, 15% of US gross domestic product) and has been associated with large volumes of potentially preventable morbidity and mortality, has heretofore not been viewed as a safety-critical industry. This paper proposes that improving safety performance in healthcare must involve a re-envisioning of healthcare itself as a safety-critical industry, but one with considerable differences from most engineered safety-critical systems. This has implications both for healthcare, and for conceptions of safety-critical industries.
Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Florida - Jacksonville, 655 W 8th Street, Jacksonville, FL 32209, USA. wears@ufl.edu
Robert
R
Lwears
D006804:Ergonomics; D019981:Health Care Sector / Q000458:organization & administration; D006801:Humans; D015279:Organizational Culture; D061214:Patient Safety; D013598:Systems Theory