Let’s talk about non-technical skills, human factors, system performance and human wellbeing

In this section we’ll talk about Human Factors and non-technical skills. We hope that by the end of this section you will have a good understanding of the importance of these skills and why some of them are things we look for when you apply to dental school.

At dental school and in many other high risk professions such as the aeronautical industry there is an important focus not only on developing clinical or manual skills also known as ‘technical skills’ but also on ‘non-technical skills’ such as 

• communication
• teamwork
• leadership
• healthcare design
• managing wellbeing
• improvement sciences
• knowing what to do when things go wrong

This article aims to introduce you to the scientific discipline of Human Factors which brings together a number of these elements.

Human Factors brings together several different sciences including – anatomy, psychology and physiology with the aim of optimising two things:

• System Performance
• Human Wellbeing 

System Perfomance

System Performance in healthcare relates to things like, improving the safety of patients, the success of procedures, reducing complication rates and improving access to care. In dentistry this could include, for example, improving the quality of root canal treatments or reducing the number of wrong teeth extracted. This short article describes simple ways to reduce complications relating to the extraction of teeth.

Human Wellbeing

Human wellbeing in healthcare relates to the wellbeing of both staff and patients. There is a realisation that if we try to make improvements in a service then it could have unintended knock-on effects to staff and if we don’t consider these sorting one problem will simply create another problem. 

A couple of examples in dentistry could be 

• Designing a new dental practice without considering where the dentists and the dental nurse will be sitting and where equipment and instrument drawers should be placed to facilitate easy access to equipment without causing injury. Back and neck problems are common in dental professionals but good surgery design and being aware of posture can help to prevent those or reduce their impact.
• Or designing a dental practice without designing in comfortable communal spaces for staff to relax in their breaks and at lunch. 

It is important to note that the terms ‘Human Factors’ and ‘Ergonomics’ can be used interchangeably and are recognised as the same.