March HFES Meeting Concerns Health Care Ergonomics
The 2017 International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care, March 5-8, 2017, will feature more than 180 presentations by health and safety researchers, policy makers, physicians and other health providers, medical device designers, health IT professionals, and biomedical engineers. It will be held at the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel in New Orleans, La.
The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society recently posted the preliminary program for the 2017 International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care, a March 5-8, 2017, event that will feature more than 180 presentations by health and safety researchers, policy makers, physicians and other health providers, medical device designers, health IT professionals, and biomedical engineers. It will be held at the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel in New Orleans, La.
Health care is the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. economy, employing more than 18 million workers, and nearly 80 percent of the health care workforce are women. Health care workers face a wide range of hazards on the job, according to NIOSH, including needlesticks, harmful exposures, back injuries, latex allergy, violence, and stress. The agency reports cases of non-fatal occupational injury and illness with health care workers are among the highest of any industry sector.
Presentations will be offered in four tracks at the HFES meeting -- Clinical and Consumer Health-Care IT, Hospital Environments, Medical and Drug-Delivery Devices, and Patient Safety Research and Initiatives, including these:
- A Human Factors Approach for Identifying Latent Failures in Health-Care Settings (Tara Cohen and Scott Shappell, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University)
- The Art and Science of Care Coordination: Where Have We Been, Where Are We Heading? (Sallie Weaver, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine)
- Identifying Unmet Patient Expectations via Critical Review of Five Simulated Hospital Rooms (Emily Patterson, Elizabeth Sanders, Carolyn Sommerich, Steve Lavender, Jing Li, and Kevin Evans, Ohio State University)
- Handoff Standardization: Understanding Heterogeneity (Kristen Welsh, Victoria Lew, Amanda Tan, Agnes Fagerlund, Joseph Keebler, and Elizabeth Lazzara, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University)
- Understanding and Improving the Delivery of Robotic Surgery "in the Wild" (Ken Catchpole, Medical University of South Carolina; Ann Bizantz, University at Buffalo, SUNY; M. Susan Hallbeck, Mayo Clinic; Rebecca Randell, University of Leeds; and Matthaius Weigl, Ludwig-Maximilians-University)
HFES says the event offers a unique opportunity for attendees from across the health care industry, academia, consulting, and regulatory agencies "to engage in discussions about emerging issues in health care, the challenges facing us in the near future, and how human factors/ergonomics researchers can meet those challenges and work to improve and advance patient safety."