Design Thinking Cartoon

Tom Fishburne has illustrated another humerus, insightful, and unfortunately all too often true, weekly cartoon on design thinking.  Visit this link to read the accompanying post.

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Health Care Team Training Evaluation Best Practices

Weaver, et al. (2011) published an article, entitled “Twelve Best Practices for Team Training Evaluation in Health Care,” in The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety.

The article intends to identify best practices for health care team training evaluation based upon nearly three decades of research and practice. Specifically, the authors state:

“Our goal is not to present a new methodology for evaluation but to distill principles from the science and temper them with the practical considerations faced on the front lines, where evaluation efforts compete with limited human, financial, and time resources” (p. 342).

They go onto clarify that:

“Although the 12 best practices may be perceived as intuitive, they are intended to serve as reminders that the notion of evidence-based practice applies to quality improvement initiatives such as team training and team development as equally as it does to clinical intervention and improvement efforts” (p. 341).

The twelve best practices, arranged according to three phases of training (Planning, Implementation, & Follow-Up), are:

Planning

• Best Practice 1. Before designing training, start backwards: Think about traditional frameworks for evaluation in reverse.
• Best Practice 2. Strive for robust, experimental design in your evaluation: It is worth the headache.
• Best Practice 3. When designing evaluation plans and metrics, ask the experts—your frontline staff.
• Best Practice 4. Do not reinvent the wheel; leverage existing data relevant to training objectives.
• Best Practice 5. When developing measures, consider multiple aspects of performance.
• Best Practice 6. When developing measures, design for variance.
• Best Practice 7. Evaluation is affected by more than just training itself. Consider organizational, team, or other factors that may help (or hinder) the effects of training (and thus evaluation outcomes).

Implementation

• Best Practice 8. Engage socially powerful players early. Physician, nursing, and executive engagement is crucial to evaluation success.
• Best Practice 9. Ensure evaluation continuity: Have a plan for employee turnover at both the participant and evaluation administration team levels.
• Best Practice 10. Environmental signals before, during, and after training must indicate that the trained KSAs and the evaluation itself are valued by the organization.

Follow-up

• Best Practice 11. Get in the game, coach! Feed evaluation results back to frontline providers and facilitate continual improvement through constructive coaching.
• Best Practice 12. Report evaluation results in a meaningful way, both internally and externally.

References

Weaver, S.J., Salas, E., & King, H.B. (2011). Twelve best practices for team training evaluation in health care. The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, 37, 341-349.*

*The August 2011 issue of  The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety can be found here (.pdf).

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Human Factors Resources for Health Care Professionals

In the past, I’ve posted numerous times on the topic of health care. Most recently I posted a working presentation on the topic entitled, Human Factors is Vital for Transforming Health Care in the 21st Century.

Unfortunately, many health care professionals have never heard of HFE, let alone understand how its’ principles, methods, and tools can be readily used in health care systems to assist in realizing important outcomes like improved quality, reduced costs, and improved accessibility. As an introduction to human factors & ergonomics for health care professionals, I’ve provided a sample of books, chapters, articles, and presentations on the topic, along with some of the thought leaders working in this area.

Books: General

Casey, S. (2006). The atomic chef: And other true tails of design, technology, and human error. Santa Barbara, CA: Aegean Publishing Company.

Norman, D.A. (1988). The design of everyday things. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Vicente, K.J. (2003). The human factor: Revolutionizing the way people live with technology. New York, NY: Routledge.

Books: Health Care-Related

Carayon, P. (2012). Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics in Patient Safety (2nd Ed). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

Dekker, S. (2011). Patient safety: A human factors approach. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

Hendrick, H.W., & Kleiner, B.M. (2002). Macroergonomics: Theory, methods, and applications. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Reid, P.P., Compton, W.D., Grossman, J.H., & Fanjiang, G. (Eds.) (2005). Building a better delivery system: A new engineering/health care partnership. Washington, DC: The National Academies of Science.

Stanton, N.A., Hedge, A., Brookhuis, K., Salas, E., Hendrick, H.W. (2004). Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics Methods. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

Chapters

Morrow, D. G., North, R. A., Wickens, C. D. (2006) Reducing and mitigating human error in medicine. In R. Nickerson (Ed.), Annual Review of Human Factors and Ergonomics, vol. 1 (pp. 254-296). Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors & Ergonomics Society.

Articles

Buckle, P., Clarkson, P.J., Coleman, R., Ward, J., & Anderson, J. (2006). Patient safety, systems design and ergonomics. Applied Ergonomics, 27, 491-500.

Carayon, P. (2006). Human factors of complex sociotechnical systems. Applied Ergonomics, 37, 525-535.

Carayon, P. (2010). Human factors in patient safety as an innovation. Applied Ergonomics, 41, 657-665.

Durso, F.T., & Drews, F.A. (2010). Health care, aviation, and ecosystems: A socio-natural systems perspective. Current Direction in Psychological Science, 19, 71-75.

Holden, R.J., & Karsh, B. (2009). A theoretical model of health information technology usage behaviour with implications for patient safety. Behaviour & Information Technology, 28, 21-38.

Leape, L.L. (2004, Summer). Human factors meets health care: The ultimate challenge. Ergonomics in Design, 6-12.

Salas, E., Baker, D., King, H., & Battles, J. (2006). Special section commentary: Opportunities and challenges for human factors and ergonomics in enhancing patient safety. Human Factors, 48, 1-4.

Schutz, A.L., Counte, M.A., & Meurer, S. (2007). Assessment of patient safety research from an organizational ergonomics and structural perspective. Ergonomics, 50, 1451-1484.

Vicente, K.J. (2008). Human factors engineering that makes a difference: Leveraging a science of societal change. Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 9, 1-24.

Presentations

Shaver, E.F. (2012, January 31). Human factors is vital for transforming health care in the 21st century.

Thought Leaders

Marilyn Sue Bogner, Ph.D., Institute for the Study of Human Error, LLC

Pascale Carayon, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison

Sidney Dekker, Ph.D., Griffith University

John Gosbee, M.D., M.S., Red Forest Consulting, LLC

Ben-Tzion Karsh, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison

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