The Human Factors Approach

How do we best design interventions, procedures, cultures in dental workplaces to ensure we optimise both system performance and human wellbeing?

Well first of all, it involves us gaining a really good understanding of all parts to a system and how they interact with each other. A system could be a single dental surgery, a dental hospital, a group of dental practices or the entire dental system in a country – whichever you are planning on implementing change. We need to have really good understanding of the people, the tasks, tools/equipment, environment (such as layout of the building or room), other influencers (workplace policies). 

Human Factors therefore is not ‘the factors of humans’ but instead it is the scientific discipline which studies interactions between different elements in a system and using this knowledge to design initiatives to optimise system performance and human wellbeing.

Example of a Human Factors Intervention Used in Dentistry

If we take the example of wrong tooth extraction, the use of a surgical safety checklist and a team brief is becoming more widely used in dentistry. This is an initiative modified from aviation and subsequently surgical teams in hospitals where the team have a short brief and complete a checklist before, during and after the procedure. It has several purposes – one is to improve teamworking but another important purpose is that it ensures that simple steps are carried at every extraction appointment such as ensuring you have the correct patient, checking if the patient has any allergies as well as confirming the correct tooth to be removed. It also aims to help empower any member of the team to speak up if something important has been missed.

This short video shows how a team brief works in surgery and this can be applied in the same way to dentistry

Immediately before performing the extraction, a ‘surgical pause’ is carried out where everyone stops what they are doing and double checks that the correct tooth is about to be removed.

At the end of the procedure the checklist prompts a ‘sign out’ where everyone confirms that if the correct tooth has been removed and that the patient has or will be provided with post-operative instructions about how to look after the socket and what to do if there are any problems.