Human-Centered Design for Healthcare Safety

Human-Centered Design for Healthcare Safety describes a conceptual framework (SEIPS or Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety) based on the Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) discipline and associated human-centered design approaches and methods that can help to create innovative solutions for enhancing healthcare safety. Healthcare safety remains a major concern around the world. With global crises, such as the economic downturn and the COVID-19 pandemic, we have observed deterioration in many aspects of patient safety, as well as major problems for healthcare workers, including burnout, stress, and issues of occupational safety and health. Therefore, we need renewed attention on how to design health care work systems and care processes to improve safety for patients and healthcare workers.

This book describes key aspects of a widely adopted HFE systems approach to healthcare safety and methods for human-centered design in healthcare. It provides insights into challenges for future research in healthcare safety. The benefits of SEIPS are promoted throughout the text and reveal how they can help to redesign technologies, and environments, and work for an organization to support, instead of hindering, the activities of all care team members, including patients and care partners. Case studies reveal examples of SEIPS in action and various domains of healthcare safety. It offers to provide practical tips on how SEIPS is implemented in practice. The reader will benefit from this book as it describes the foundation for SEIPS and human-centered design and multiple applications across varied settings and domains of healthcare safety. They will receive a toolkit for enacting solutions in their work environment.

This exciting and topical title will appeal to students and professionals in the fields of healthcare, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, other health professions, and pharmaceuticals. It will also appeal to industrial and systems engineers, biomedical engineers, HFE professionals and designers.

Author Biography

Pascale Carayon, PhD, is Professor Emerita in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. She is the Founding Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Healthcare Systems Engineering; she led the interdisciplinary Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. She received her Engineer diploma from the Ecole Centrale de Paris, France, and her PhD in Industrial Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Carayan has over three decades of HFE research experience analyzing, designing and improving complex work systems such as those in healthcare.