Human factors
Addressing human factors in decontamination
Tim Sandle discusses how human factors approaches can assist with improving performance by lowering variability in the decontamination of medical devices – thereby reducing rates of contamination and improving patient safety.
Ensuring that surgical processing departments are well-run is of great importance, as these departments are responsible for decontaminating reusable surgical equipment and for delivering it, as required, to operating theatres. Decontamination involves several processes, occurring within dedicated facilities, including cleaning, disinfection and sterilisation, which ensures reusable surgical instruments are safe for further use on patients.1
The
operation requires maintaining a well-ordered facility, ensuring it is clean and decontamination practices can be consistently reproduced. While most units have well-written
procedures, human errors will happen and these can sometimes lead, in the most serious cases, to the transference of contamination and patient infection (healthcare-associated infections). While human failure is normal and predictable, it can be identified and managed. Hence, errors can be reduced by reviewing how surgical processing departments are managed and how personnel operate, in particular, by reducing the level of variability. An approach that can deliver success in this area is the ‘human factors method’.
This article looks at three areas where human
factors approaches can assist with improving performance through lowering variability and, hence, reducing contamination rates. These are: l Development of procedures. l Training. l Space and ergonomics.
Prior to this, the article introduces the subject of human factors and looks at sources of variability within surgical processing departments.
Human factors An important part of the human factors method is with the involvement of all personnel and
While human failure is normal and predictable, it can be identified and managed. Hence, errors can be reduced by reviewing how surgical processing departments are managed and how personnel operate, in particular by reducing the level of variability.
putting aside any notion that ‘people are the problem’.2
This reactive approach will not deliver
the required gains. Instead, there needs to be an understanding of the influencing factors that help shape human performance and to build on these and to involve people in seeking to improve work processes. Human factors sciene has been applied to many industries, and this includes healthcare. According to the International Ergonomics
Association (IEA), human factors “is the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimise human wellbeing and overall system performance.”3 When applied to the healthcare domain, the objective “is to maximise the system’s overall performance, while promoting the health, safety, comfort, and quality of the working lives of healthcare workers.”4
To help guide the process,
it is important that personnel understand the different sources of contamination, vectors of contamination, and with what the consequences for the patient are should decontamination
August 2023 I
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