The AHS Human Factors and Evaluation Team Journey in the Last Decade

Human factors optimizes the interaction among humans and other elements of a system. The AHS Human Factors and Evaluation (HF&E) team engages with front line clinicians, patients, and families to generate innovative solutions to improve the healthcare system and reduce patient safety incidents.

Over the last 10 years the HF&E team has grown from two to eleven team members and we have been fortunate to collaborate with a wide variety of AHS groups throughout the Province.

Highlights include:

• Collaborating with Connect Care stakeholders to recommend design changes which will help ensure system safety and usability.

• Embedding human factors evaluation methods into new facility design and build projects to identify the needs of patients and families as well as clinicians that may improve the design.

• Developing tools that support collaborative practice, such as the paper prototype ‘Integrated Care Suite’ which provides a new model for interdisciplinary charting.

• Supporting SCN best practice definition around surgical counts.

• Helping local operational teams consider how to reduce the possibility of human error in their everyday work.

The Human Factors and Evaluation team is very excited to continue the journey and looks forward to working together to help improve the healthcare system for the next 10 years and beyond.