ABSTRACT
It is now widely accepted that the scientific discipline of ‘human factors’ can make a significant contribution to understanding, evaluating and enhancing healthcare safety and performance, but less so around improving value for money. However recent journal publications by human factors experts highlight examples of how the discipline can be unintentionally misrepresented in the healthcare literature [1, 2]. For those of us working to advance human factors understanding in the NHS this provides further confirmation of our professional experiences in the workplace. We often bear witness in conferences, workshop settings, training sessions, websites and policy documents to the unintentional muddled thinking and misunderstandings propagated by ‘experts’ and ‘those with an interest’ (mostly clinicians and aviation consultants) that regularly accompanies presentations, discussions and debate devoted to the topic of human factors. The implications are of high importance to improving patient safety, developing and spreading appropriate HF educational content, and the integrity of the wider HF community because of the confusion that arises and the potential of NHS staff to misapply related knowledge and methods. Unfortunately there is very limited HF expertise within the NHS, particularly at senior levels, to counter misunderstandings and also contribute to the design, leadership and implementation of a more informed HF educational strategy for the healthcare workforce. The lack of real HF expertise at strategic and operational levels in the NHS and how to ‘close this gap’ is clearly also an issue of high relevance to the HF profession.
