Healthcare is perhaps the most complex safety-critical sector, and the challenges have only increased throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Increasingly, human and organisational factors have come under the spotlight. Manoj Kumar is a consultant general surgeon with a background also in safety, human factors, and training. In this conversation with Steven Shorrock, Manoj provides insights and perspectives on the realities of work in healthcare, and the team’s role in improvement.
Reflections on what distinguishes the three zones of performance in the well-known graph associated with Safety-II.
‘Human Factors’ (or Ergonomics) is often presented as something that it’s not, or as something…
This article was published in The Ergonomist, published by the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and…
Safety-II has become a talking point. It is discussed not only among safety professionals, but – perhaps more importantly – among front line practitioners, managers, board members and regulators in a wide array of industries. But what is the real focus of Safety-II?
Nuclear Family is a gripping piece of interactive theatre which follows Joe and Ellen, nuclear…
Written and directed by Matthew Wilkinson. A thrilling modern tragedy about a Russian architect driven…
There has been much talk in recent years about ‘never events’ and ‘zero harm’, similar to talk in the safety community about ‘zero accidents’. It sounds obvious: no one would want an accident. And we all wish that serious harm would not result from accidents. But as expressed and implemented top-down, never/zero is problematic for many reasons. In this post, I shall outline just a few, as I see them.
Again, a familiar smoke pattern has emerged from the ashes of a high-profile accident. The…
If you work in an industry such as transportation or healthcare – where human involvement is…
Humanistic Systems 