Human Factors and Ergonomics of Prehospital Emergency Care

Prehospital medicine (also known as out-of-hospital medicine or emergency madical services) is a complex enterprise that intersects healthcare, public safety, public health, and transportation-both air and ground As a domain that relies heavily on precise human performance to balance effectiveness and safety under austere conditions, it is crucial that providers, leaders, and researchers look to the science of Human Factors and Ergonomics (Hf/E) to inform the design of their systems and processes. Because of the vulnerabilities inherent to human cognition and those imposed by complex sociotechnical systems, efforts targeted to enhance the quality of care and effectiveness of operations in prehospital medicine must take a comprehensive, systems approach. Thus, HF/E is a critical yet overlooked component for safely and innovatively advancing the mission of our global emergency care lately net. This volume is the first step toward bridging the two worlds. Human Factors and Ergonomics (HF/E) is derived from multiple disciplines (e.g.. computer science, organizational management, cognitive psychology, engineering, and industrial design) to represent a broad, interdisciplinary science to handle the interface between humans and their work systems. The primary objective of HF/E is to make systems supportive, safe, reliable, and intuitive by adopting a multilevel approach. This bock seeks to: Introduce HF/E to the opportunity of applications in the prehospital care domain, Introduce the prehospital care domain to the psychology of human performance and systems engineering, Emphasize prevention of medical errors and patient safety, informed by the workings and limitations of the human's cognitive abilities, Describe and discuss teamwork in prehospital care - from dyads to multi-team systems Human Factors sad Ergonomics of Prehospital Emergency Care is organized to focus on the aspects of the individual the team, and the organization to holistically capture the delivery of prehospital medicine Since prehospital medicine is often neglected in terms of funding and research, it is our hope with this book to give practitioners some insight into the systematic factors that contribute to suboptimal processes and outcomes by delineating the confluence of prehospital medicine and HF/E to allow us to redesign the system to make it wrier and more effective for our patients and our providers. Book jacket.