British Journal of Anaesthesia, 2001, Vol. 87, No. 5 678-681
© 2001 The Board of Management and Trustees of the British Journal of Anaesthesia
Editorial |
Editorial II
Monitoring medical devices: the need for new evaluation methodology
The publication of the document entitled ‘An organisation with a memory: report of an expert group on learning from adverse events in the NHS chaired by the Chief Medical Officer’1 by the Department of Health (DoH) last year has focused attention on preventable failures in NHS care. It was observed that the mechanisms for detecting, reporting and analysing failures were incomplete and frequently flawed. Following on from this, it was noted that, in cases where important lessons were learned, there was often a failure to embed these into future practice, resulting in repetition of the same failures. The National Patient Safety Agency2 has recently been created to address these issues.
The observations made in the DoH document are particularly true in the areas of perioperative medicine and critical care, where several factors predispose to failure of care. These factors include the proliferation of high-technology medical devices;3 the low signal provided
Detecting failures attributable to poor usability
Difficulties in reporting and analysing usability problems
Implications for active learning
Strategic approaches to usability analysis: problems and potential solutions
Implications for equipment design
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