[Patient safety and training in human factor--challenge for anaesthesia training]

Patient safety is a central issue for every hospital. Prerequisites are reliable routine processes, avoidance of accidents, and flexible management of incidents. In anaesthesia, ca. 80% of all incidents can be assigned to human factors (e.g. communication, management of workload, decision-making). Deficits in these non-technical skills affect directly or indirectly the patient safety. Therefore, training of anaesthesia personnel in human factors and development of non-technical skills contribute to enhancement of patient safety. The question is how non-technical skills can be taught and learned. In this paper, we discuss an integrated strategy for training in non-technical skills in medicine. In a first step (analysis of demand), data were acquired as to which non-technical skills required training. These data led to the development of a comprehensive training concept for physicians based on learning psychology-derived modules. The individual modules and their methodological implementation are briefly presented here. Besides the communication of knowledge about human factors, we discuss the employment of computer-simulated low-fidelity scenarios and full-scale patient simulators. In principle, this integrative training strategy can be easily adapted to other related medical branches.