SafetyDog

Is there an I-O Psychologist in the house?

In I-O Psychology on August 30, 2010 at 1:27 am

The I-O Psychologist as an Error Prevention Specialist.  There is so much an I-O Psychologist could bring to the hospital environment. Hospitals are complex and usually large organizations that have great needs for human resource management, training and development programs, team functioning, leadership competency and safety processes. While of these areas are certainly within the scope of I-O Psychology, one role that would be especially well-suited for the skill and knowledge that an I-O Psychologist possesses would relate to safety in the realm of human factors and engineering……. Since the publication of “to err is human” by the IOM in 1999, hospitals have begun to look at mistakes in the workplace from a systems perspective, however a recent review of progress was not encouraging (Buerhaus, 2004). Employee engagement and systems are important but ultimately it is the study of the way human factors interact with the system, individually and in groups that will assist in error prevention. In the individual worker, errors may be caused by attention or memory failure in the form of slips and lapses (Cronin, 2006). Mistakes are defined as failures of intention (Cronin, 2006). In terms of the organization these become incidents, accidents and disasters (Cooke & Rohleder, 2006).

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