A Review of Ergonomics and Simulation Modeling in Healthcare Delivery System

This paper is an overview of recent issues in determining healthcare delivery systems and aims to explain how Human Factor and Ergonomics (HFE) and simulation modeling can contribute to the quality of patient safety and healthcare delivery. It has been found that the layout of the patient unit and resources are significant factors that influence the amount of medication errors and therefore should be included in any description of the research context. Therefore current trends and applications of HFE as well as simulation modeling and how they can contribute to provide safe, efficient, and effective service to the patients are discussed. This review provides previous work of researchers to identify relationships between these two areas of research, particularly in patient safety. The review suggests that, high rate of medication administration error is due to inefficient healthcare delivery system and highlights the efficiency of simulation modeling versus ergonomics in analyzing the root cause of problems in clinical performance.

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