Over the years there have been adverse incidents involving injuries and deaths, and many of them have been attributed to human errors and individual recklessness. Attention is paid to the individuals because they are typically the final link in an incident chain. Indeed, effective and safe health care relies on whether the healthcare work systems and technology employed can support healthcare providers’ work performance. Immediately or only focusing on how to “fix” the individuals for the prevention of human errors and undesirable behaviors is likely to be ineffective. Instead, trying to understand the root causes from human factors engineering and systems perspectives, i.e., whether the performance and safety problems stem from work system and technology design issues, can provide more insights into why an incident happens. This presentation aims to introduce the discipline of human factors engineering and discuss how it can be used to improve the design of healthcare work systems and technology for work performance and safety. Human factors engineering principles and healthcare cases will be discussed to raise awareness of the importance of the discipline in the improvement of healthcare performance and safety.
