[Patient safety as the first priority in healthcare]

Patient safety is an important issue in today's health care. This paper takes a human factor perspective to emphasize the importance of designing health care systems to account for caregiver personal characteristics and capabilities in order to compensate for individual caregiver limitations. This paper was designed to help nurses understand the impact of the human factor on patient safety. The authors hope that caregivers can use provided principles related to work systems, procedures, equipment and environments to improve patient safety and care systems.