Physiological and psychological aspects

Preventable adverse events in modern healthcare settings are the leading cause of deaths in the United States. The field of human factors and ergonomics has investigated the physiological, psychological, and psychosocial stressors that affect healthcare personnel performance and contribute to these preventable events, deteriorated healthcare worker’s quality of life, and employee burnout. Five of these stressors-workflow, shift work, staffing, working with electronic health records (EHRs), and patient handling-are discussed as relevant to clinical engineering. These stressors are presented through the frameworks of human performance and information processing theories, resource allocation theories, physiological adaptation, and effort-reward systems to derive recommendations for designing tasks, tools, technologies, training, and other engineering considerations for alleviating these stressors.