Work system design for patient safety: the SEIPS model

Most errors and inefficiencies in patient care arise not from the solitary actions of individuals but from conflicting, incomplete, or suboptimal systems of which they are a part and with which they interact. To improve the design of these systems, the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) has proposed the application of engineering concepts and methods—in particular, human factors and systems engineering.

This study which includes HIP Investigator Maureen Smith describes the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS), which meets this challenge through a novel integration of human factors and healthcare quality models and proposes the SEIPS model of work system and patient safety. They found that the SEIPS model is useful for providing a view of the whole system instead of focusing on only one aspect of the work system and treating that aspect in isolation.