Why Studying Human Behavior is a Critical Component of Patient Safety

Since humans are an integral part of healthcare delivery, it is appropriate to understand how human nature and human error impact patient safety. A thorough understanding of the interactions between humans and the medical environment could help decrease errors that result in patient harm. This article describes some of our findings from a study that revealed unexpected behaviors which were documented on video during critical events (cardiac arrests) in a pediatric cardiac intensive care unit (CICU). We changed our training process for cardiac arrests as well as our nurse staffing in the CICU based upon results of our study. We believe that the lessons learned in our CICU are generalizable to both inpatient and ambulatory settings. We also emphasize the importance of collaborating with social scientists to rigorously study innate maladaptive patterns of human behavior to determine strategies to mitigate "human factors" during acute medical crises.