We are delighted to announce that Patient Safety Learning has been recognised amongst the finalists at this year’s Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors (CIEHF) Professional Awards 2021.
We finished as runners-up for the President’s Award, which is for any group, institution or organisation that has made an outstanding contribution to the development of ergonomics and human factors in a specific industry or particular field of application. A short video providing an overview of the work we were nominated for can be found here.
Human factors and patient safety
Many patient safety issues are caused by systemic problems with poor design at their core. Human factors and ergonomics are hugely important in understanding human performance issues in health and social care and helping to identify risk of avoidable harm and the solutions needed to ensure patient and staff safety.
Human factors and ergonomics feature very strongly in our award-winning platform to share learning for patient safety, the hub. We have created several areas for sharing and discussing a range of patient safety issues relating to this, including:
- The importance of designing for safety
- Our gallery highlighting error traps
- Our human factors resource section
As an organisation we also work closely with CIEHF and human factors/ergonomics professionals on a variety of areas relating to the development of new approaches, guidance, and resources for patient safety. Some examples of this include contributing to the development of CIEHF’s Vaccinating a nation, its guidance aimed at supporting the safe roll-out of Covid-19 vaccination programmes, and highlighting concerns around the safety of new rapidly developed ventilators during the early stages of the pandemic.
We are honoured to have been considered for this year’s President’s Award and to finish as runners-up alongside a very strong list of contenders. As we develop the hub as a global knowledge repository for patient safety, we will continue to embed the principles of human factors and ergonomics in all our work, in collaboration with leaders and clinicians in health and social care and working in partnership with the CIEHF.
