THE ROLE OF HUMAN FACTORS IN THE INTENSIVE CARE UNIT

Once upon a time there were almost no formal investigations of the nature of human errors in hospitals. Today, however, there is an abundance of reports and a plethora of papers publishing robust data on this subject.

The paper by Donchin and colleagues¹ was one of the first publications to investigate the nature of human errors in the intensive care unit (ICU), adopting approaches developed by human factors engineering. The ICU environment is complex, dynamic, with a constant change in time and stress. There is an excess of high technology equipment to facilitate diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of patients, but this often creates additional unexpected demands. The definition of human error in this study was vague, but this is the case in many classifications and taxonomies of human error—both with regard to genotype and phenotype.^2,3 Even with more precise definitions it is difficult to achieve satisfactory descriptions and explanations of error in humans, given the complex nature of human interactions. Decision making by healthcare providers is influenced by factors such as workload, economy, ethics, and safety issues, which make the true picture much more difficult to fit neatly into a …