Designing innovations aligned with patients’ needs and workflows requires human factors/ergonomics (HF/E) fieldwork in home and community settings. Fieldwork in these extra-institutional settings is challenged by a need to balance the occasionally competing priorities of patient and informal caregiver participants, study team members, and the overall project. We offer several strategies that HF/E professionals can use before, during, and after home and community site visits to optimize fieldwork and mitigate challenges in these settings. Strategies include interacting respectfully with participants, documenting the visit, managing the study team–participant relationship, and engaging in dialogue with institutional review boards.
We describe a new surgical checklist for veterinary cardiologists based on the literature and the application of human factors design. The checklist was developed and iterated with subject-matter experts and was implemented for 4 months, during which use of the checklist was monitored, feedback was gathered, and a final survey was distributed to assess subjective experiences. Although developed for the cardiology team, the checklist also affected the anesthesia team by requiring information and responses to be transmitted across teams. Interviews, subjective reports, and observations pointed to the fact that the checklist engendered communication, particularly by requiring the thoughts and expectations of team members to be stated explicitly.
The study of the operating room (OR) began over a century ago and has continued to advance. However, for nonmedical researchers, unique challenges present themselves that must be carefully addressed. We present an overview of the OR aimed at nonmedical researchers interested in studying the OR environment. Based on our extensive experience, we identify several key challenges and describe ways to circumvent them. With a respectable understanding of the OR environment, we can prepare a researcher to gather useful data. Such investigations have the potential to yield great insights about cost savings, efficiency, methods, processes, and general human interaction, among others.
Patients arriving in the Accident and Emergency Department tend to be moved about throughout the care journey. Although each trolley bed had a tray table attached at the end of the bed for clinical use, its space was limited and additional equipment might be left on the bedside cabinets. Hence these items were easily left behind when patients shifted to another care area. The tray table attachments on the trolley beds became the focus of a redesign effort to improve storage capability in this mobile, dynamic environment. Through the combined use of human factors and design thinking methods, a successful proof of concept was realized.