The Working Group aims to nourish and share knowledge of Human and Organizational Factors applied to design, implementation and use of healthcare technologies. Our long term goal is fostering human-centred technologies, quality and safety. We understand Human and Organizational Factors as a health-system science, where environmental and organizational dimensions play a highly significant role on the safe use of technologies.

Chair:
Romaric Marcilly
email: romaric.marcilly@univ-lille.fr

Co-chair:
Valentina Lichtner
email: v.lichtner@leeds.ac.uk

Our most recent contribution has been a response to the World Health Organisation (WHO) ‘Global Patient Safety Action Plan 2021–2030 Towards Zero Patient Harm in Health care’ consultation [1]. The Action Plan aims at sustaining patient safety worldwide, through building an infrastructure of principles and resources founded on Human Factors and High Reliability Organisations sciences, as well as partnerships and solidarity. In particular, the Action Plan (in its draft/consultation form) included the strategic objective to ‘develop a digital strategy to improve the safety of health care’ (objective 6.5), to which we responded with a call for vigilance of unintended consequences of new technology, especially those with high level of automation and loss of human control.

Members of the WG are planning to attend MIE 2021, NI 2021, MEDINFO 2021 and CSHI 2021 virtually. We hope we’ll meet, through our digital screens, many of the readers of this newsletter. We’ll discuss the ideas, opportunities, and challenges posed by the increasing presence of (automated) technology in our daily lives, including in healthcare.

[1] available on the EFMI/HOFMI website at: (https://efmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/HOFMI-et-al-Response-to-WHO-Consultation-27Sept20-1.pdf)