Human Engineering and Safety in Health Care Systems—What Have We Learned?

In the introduction to this book we presented the argument that the increasing number of medical errors, as well as the increased load and decreased efciency in the functioning of medical staff members, are caused by faulty human factors engineering and a lack of organizational planning of the personnel’s roles and medical work environments. We emphasized the fact that the rapid development of health care systems, treatment techniques, and their increasingly greater sophistication were accompanied by a signicant increase in the technological complexity of the systems, cumulative amount of medical knowledge, and need for teamwork. However, they were not accompanied by a concomitant investment in the planning and adaptation of these new systems and work processes for the medical staff members who work within them. Therefore, medical personnel are forced to work in a hostile work environment, which not only does not support them, but rather increases the dif- culty of their job performance.