Human Factors (373NBT)

Mandatory: Foundation Year 2

Human factors principles aim to understand the ‘fit’ between an employee, their equipment and the surrounding environment, which can include learning styles, behaviours and values, leadership, teamwork, the design of equipment and processes, communication and organisational culture. Through a better understanding of these principles, changes can be made that result in a reduction of human error and higher quality care and patient safety.

This teaching session will cover the four domains of Human Factors – Decision making, teamworking, situational awareness and communication – and will give you an insight into the ways that these are important in clinical practice. There will be interactive elements to explore these different facets of human factors and you will be introduced to strategies and tools to understand your own work settings and help you to mitigate potential pitfalls in real life, as well as use in your quality improvement and patient safety projects.

Decision Making

• Identify factors that influence decision-making in the clinical setting.

Teamworking

• Describe the key components of good teamworking and apply this to clinical practice.
• Demonstrate effective teamworking by working within a group to plan, develop and perform a short presentation.

Situational Awareness

• Discuss the importance of situational awareness using clinical cases to illustrate potential pitfalls

Communication

• Recognise communication ‘tools’ that can be used to improve communication in the clinical setting.
• Demonstrate an understanding of effective communication in small group tasks and discussion.

Mapped to the Foundation Programme 2021 curriculum, this course links with the following Foundation Professional Capabilities (FPCs):

HLO 1: FPC 5 - Continuity of care

HLO 2: FPC 6 - Sharing the vision, FPC 9 - Quality improvement

HLO 3: FPC 11 - Ethics and law, FPC 12 - Continuing professional development