Clinical work patterns, safety and health information technology

Groups related to this event

Centre for Health Systems and Safety Research

Event date

Tuesday, 15 November 2016

Speaker

Professor Johanna Westbrook, Director, Centre for Health Systems and Safety Research, AIHI.

Abstract

How do doctors and nurses spend their time? Are interrupting and multi-tasking successful work strategies? Do clinical information systems allow health professionals to spend more time in direct patient care?

Many health care reforms and large scale health information technology interventions are designed to influence health professionals’ work and communication patterns resulting in improvements in safety and quality of care. Rarely are these patterns of work quantified or changes measured. Few studies have sought to identify associations between patterns of work and care delivery outcomes.

This presentation will report on a large program of research which has developed and applied direct observation methods for examining how health professionals distribute their time, engage with others and use different communication strategies, such as interrupting and multi-tasking, to deal with competing demands. These studies have explored patterns of work of doctors and nurses and how these change following introduction of clinical information systems.

Interesting findings about the ways in which emergency physicians use interruptions and multitasking; the impact of interruptions to nurses during medication administration and variations in patterns of junior doctors’ work during the day, evening and weekends, provide insights into how clinical information systems might be better designed to support clinical work.

View the seminar video.

Speaker profile

Professor Johanna Westbrook, is Director of the Centre for Health Systems and Safety Research, Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Macquarie University. She is internationally recognised for her research evaluating the effects of information and communication technology (ICT) in health care. Johanna has led important research in the development and application of approaches to evaluate ICT, including new tools and methods which have been adopted internationally.

Her research has led to significant advances in our understanding of how clinical information systems deliver (or fail to deliver) expected benefits and supported translation of this evidence into policy, practice, and IT system changes.

Seminar details

Date: Tuesday 15th November 2016

Time: 12pm - 1pm

Venue: Seminar Room, Level 1, 75 Talavera Road, Macquarie University

Chair: Professor Enrico Coiera, Director Centre for Health Informatics, AIHI

To register for this seminar please click here