New Territories East Cluster (NTEC) Session - Human Factors

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.

Humans have cognitive limitations (e.g. limited attentional capacity) but also great capabilities (e.g. ability to divide attention between certain tasks). Human Factors (HF) is a multi-disciplinary subject to study humans’ limitations and capabilities in their work environment; the aim is to enhance human work performance by designing appropriate tools or modifying the environment to address those limitations and capabilities.
This talk has two parts: the first part introduces the history and origin of HF to illustrate how human performance is not always under the direct control of our cognition but is influenced by the environment. The emphasis on understanding the role of environment in determining human behaviour is further illustrated by examples from the psychology and human error literature.
In the second part of the talk, I will describe my current research on auditory displays for patient monitoring. Auditory displays are displays that use sounds to inform clinicians about their patients’ vital signs such as SpO2, heart rate, blood pressure, etc. One type of auditory displays is time-compressed speech, which are sped-up speech phrases. I will describe a few laboratory studies that show the effectiveness of time-compressed speech and discuss its HF implications, and why it might be an alternative to using alarms for patient monitoring.