1/6/11 Anesthesia Non-Technical Skills Human Factors

✤ We are in a high risk organization ✤ Significant levels of redundancy and protection are built in to our systems ✤ As the hardware and software have become increasingly reliable... ✤ The human contribution to accidents has become more apparent

Human Factors ✤ Analysis of several high risk industries have indicated that up to 80% of all accidents can be attributed to human factors ✤ What this means is we need to understand the human dimension, specifically the behavior of those working on safety critical tasks, or the “sharp end” ✤ Anesthesia definitely falls within this descriptor ✤ We know human error cannot be eliminated entirely ✤ But we can try to minimize, catch, and mitigate errors by ensuring that people have the appropriate Non-technical skills

Non-Technical Skills What are they? ✤ Cognitive and social skills that complement workers technical skills ✤ More Specifically: ✤ the cognitive, social, and personal resource skills that complement technical skills, and contribute to to safe and efficient task performance ✤ These are not mysterious and elusive skills ✤ They are essentially what the best practitioners do in order to achieve a consistently high performance and what the rest of us do on a good day

ANTS

Non-Technical Skills ✤ They come largely from the aviation industry ✤ But, studies show that these skills are critical in many industries ✤ Medicine ✤ Nuclear power plant control room ✤ Psychologists have shown that human behavior is remarkably similar across all kinds of workplaces ✤ It is important to remember that technical skills without behavioral skills or behavioral skills without technical skills can be equally ineffective

Behavior ✤ Behavior is influenced by many things ✤ Conditions that we work ✤ Fatigue/Workload/Schedule ✤ Behavior of others ✤ Hostile surgeons/passive aggressive nurses