The CHFG will aim to enhance the knowledge of all healthcare professionals about human factors and how to more successfully manage human error. The CHFG will have no political or policy agenda other than to define and encourage best practice.
Vision
Our vision is to engender human factors thinking in the hearts and minds of all healthcare staff and stakeholders. From board to ward and beyond…
Mission
Our mission is to facilitate understanding of how humans interact with their environment and those around them, and to use this to improve patient safety by reducing the possibility and impact of errors.
Who are we?
We are an ‘influencing and sharing group’, the only broadly aimed healthcare group doing this within the ‘human factors’ arena who are genuinely independent, with only impartial best practice as our goal.
The group is organised into a Standing Group which consists of approximately 15 human factors and industry experts who are helping define and champion best practice in human factors for the clinical professions and healthcare service. Over time we expect significant sub groups to form as a natural extension of workload and need for work within specialist areas.
Find out more about the current members of the Standing Group >>
The Standing Group advises and promotes best practice. It does not deliver products or training as such, although sub-groups may be sponsored to assist in these processes.
Members are unpaid and all committee members are volunteers (expenses are covered through the support of the Health Foundation). Sub-groups will usually be supported by a specific sponsoring organisation(s).
The agenda for the group is principally driven by its own insight into areas requiring significant human factors development. It is also influenced by the direction of the National Patient Safety Forum and other significant bodies responsible for patient safety, such as the new Health Innovation Council, Strategic Health Authority (SHAs), Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA), National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE), National Health Service Institute for Innovation and Improvement (NHS III), World Health Organization (WHO), Postgraduate Medical Education and Training Board (PMETB), Royal Colleges and the Healthcare Commission.
The CHFG Standing Group has four main workstreams.
They are:
At this stage, the CHFG has deciced to commit its efforts to items one and two.
The two key actions discussed in June 2007 were conducting a stakeholder analysis and developing a database of research, stories, case studies and testimonies. At this stage we know the approximate key stakeholders (politicians, policy-makers, chief executives and clinicians). We are currently working on a project to reap the richest source of human factors evidence that is already within the supporters of the CHFG. All of us for one reason or another have identified that understanding Human Factors is critical to improving patient safety, but why? In a patient’s case it is perhaps because of an error that occurred, in other cases it may be because of research and data collection they may have been involved in, others may have witnessed an incident or error. For this reason we are collating that evidence from CHFG supporters. In the longer term we will develop each story (perhaps with expert comment from Human Factors specialists or with representatives from other clinical professionals). Testimonies may have to be re-written depending on the audience, so that they can be used as a toolkit for convincing others.
This evidence-gathering process will enable us to develop a toolkit of evidence from a variety of sources and backgrounds to appeal to a range of people in positions of influence. It’s an exciting project and we believe it’s the first time anything like this has been done anywhere in healthcare.
We need to raise awareness of Human Factors at a number of different levels to reach clinicians and support staff, chief executives, policy-makers and of course politicians. The CHFG has already identified a number of key routes for this. Personal contact with key people is a major part of our background work. As a result of lobbying, our launch seminar was supported by the Government’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer and received financial support from the Department of Health. We have also had meetings with many influential people in the key organisations that make up the healthcare system in the UK (and to a lesser extent this also includes the private sector). On a wider scale, we are engaging many people via articles in the public and clinical press and by speaking at conferences. However, we expect that once we have our evidence toolkit we will be able to plan a more coordinated approach to raising awareness.