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“This is about learning; it’s not about trying to blame anybody”
logically they should set themselves up as a charity. And so, with a £5,000 grant secured by Martin from the Health Foundation, the CHFG was born. Aſter discussions with his employer, he
decided to continue flying at around half the time and dedicate the remainder, in an unpaid capacity, to spreading the clinical human factors message. Tat was nine years ago, and in the
intervening period the number of active supporters has grown to around 3,000 people across the UK. Te CHFG run free seminars and conferences, publish guidance documents and illustrative health stories, and generally do their utmost to promote dialogue and sharing of their ideas across the healthcare spectrum. Teir goal is to show that a better understanding of the role of human factors can have a significant impact on safety, quality and productivity. In day-to-day terms, Martin explains, it’s
about encouraging a system that, for example, makes it difficult to give someone the wrong drug – through better labelling and more standardised storage procedures – and more acceptable to double-check with colleagues that it’s the right drug, at the right dosage and by the correct route,
SPRING 2016
even under pressure of time. At bottom, he says, it’s about having
multiple lines of defence that take into account that “no matter how good or intelligent or knowledgeable you are, you can still get it wrong”. Te NHS is a many-headed behemoth,
of course, and the greatest challenge is altering policy. “A lot of my time is spent trying to persuade people at policy level about ways they can redesign the system to do it better. I’m not an expert, but what I can do is at least overcome some of the inertia and provide some motivation for people to go out and get that expertise.” Tere has been change over the years.
Whereas at the beginning he would find about one per cent of clinicians had heard about human factors, nowadays it’s a majority, even if they don’t understand what it is. “Te teaching of it is much more widespread, but we’re still a long way from embedding it.”
Thank you for speaking up Embedding a human factors approach on the personal level, says Martin, begins by clinicians asking themselves: what can I do with my behaviour that’s going to
encourage people to be safe around me? One answer, he suggests, is to ask open questions. “You might walk into a situation and know exactly how to deal with it. But you should stop yourself and ask a more junior colleague, how do you think we should deal with this? It not only helps to develop them, but more importantly they might well see something you don’t.” Another is to thank people for speaking
up. “Tat encouragement is so important. I’ve had people saying to me when I’m flying, Martin, don’t forget such and such. Half the time I think, yes, well I was going to do that anyway. But I say thank you, because I know that next time I might genuinely have forgotten and be about to make a complete idiot of myself. “It’s about humility because we are all so
capable of screwing up. Safety in a complex world cannot be delivered by just one person, it has to be delivered by a team.”
n Adam Campbell is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to MDDUS publications
Find out more about the Clinical Human Factors Group at
http://chfg.org
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