Presented By: Dr. Kenneth Catchpole, Ph.D
September 2018

Human factors is the study of the relationship between individuals and the systems they work in, which originally grew out of a combination of management science and applied psychological research in aviation. Application of these principles in healthcare has contributed to important advances in technologies, teamwork training and task-aids such as checklists. However, we are coming to understand that these individual, reductionist, approaches do not take into account the complex interactions in between that can have important implications for success. Checklists and other task-based improvements are much more successful if we also improve teamwork and the supporting technologies. The teamwork required for successful orthopedic surgery is different from that required for cardiac surgery, and skill development benefits from understanding these differences. The introduction of new surgical technologies such as robotics or image guidance changes the tasks, roles, and successful communication strategies, offering multiple ways to improve performance and provide smoother technology adoption and integration. There is also growing evidence that combination interventions – for example, teamwork training and improved structure of work systems – may be more powerful than any one either alone. This webinar uses clinical examples and published evidence to explore the interactions between tasks, technologies and teams, and how this knowledge can be used to create successful, sustainable improvements in the safety, quality and efficiency of surgical care.

Objectives:

• Introduce Human Factors science and practice and describe the value this understanding can bring to surgical performance, human error and patient safety
• Explore how surgical tasks, team skills and technologies interact in different ways to produce benefits and risks using examples from Cardiac, Vascular, Orthopedic, Spinal and Robotic surgeries
• Describe how this knowledge can be applied to create improvements in behavior, teamwork, process, efficiency and outcomes