Human factors principles, increasingly applied to patient safety work, offer insight that may help you mitigate risks associated with pandemic-related workforce challenges.

A primer from AHRQ Patient Safety Network at the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality lays out some of the stressors on the people delivering health care services that could impact patient safety, such as clinician fatigue, inadequate team trust, and time pressures.

More importantly, it suggests a series of steps — informed by human factors research — that can ease the physical and emotional burden on the health care workforce. These ideas can be readily implemented by health care organizations, including prominent signage, workflow reviews, checklists and simulations.

Read more about human factors from AHRQ’s Patient Safety Network