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Human factors: Designing health services for people

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Let me start with a statement of the blindingly obvious: People are fundamental to health services. Design whatever health system you like but you'll still need people to deliver healthcare to those other people - patients.

As an example, Oxford University Hospitals Trust has more than 12,000 staff and around one million patient contacts each year.

So when you're designing or redesigning parts of your hospital or drawing up new processes and procedures, it's probably a good idea to take the people into account…

For example, you have two drugs to inject into a patient. One needs to be injected into the spine, the other into a vein. The catch: If you inject the second drug into the spine, it is almost always fatal. The problem: The two drugs look pretty much the same – syringes in clear packaging.

Read more (Oxford Science blog)