Resilient Medical Systems

What properties make medical systems resilient and how can resilience be designed into systems?

Work on understanding disasters and other incidents has historically focussed on what has gone wrong. However, most of the time things actually go right. Resilience engineering is concerned with understanding what makes some systems more resilient than others and how to build resilience in. In this project we are investigating what makes medical settings resilient and how a resilience engineering approach could help to make them more resilient to human error.

You can hear Jonathan talking about error and reslilience in the video below - we have more videos on our YouTube channel too.

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CHI+MED publications

• George Buchanan, Jonathan Back, Dominic Furniss & Ann Blandford
  Attention: Can appropriation be linked to an individual's resilience? Paper for workshop on Appropriation and Creative Use at CHI 2011
  
  
• Paolo Masci, Paul Curzon, Huayi Huang, Rimvydas Ruksenas, Ann Blandford, Dominic Furniss & Atish Rajkomar
  Towards a formal framework for reasoning about the resilience of dynamic interactive systems
  
  
• Dominic Furniss, Jonathan Back & Ann Blandford
  Unwritten rules for safety and performance in an oncology daycare unit: Testing the Resilience Markers framework
  
  
• Dominic Furniss, Jonathan Back, Ann Blandford, Michael Hildebrandt & Helena Broberg
  A resilience markers framework for small teams Reliability Engineering + System Safety, 96 (1), 2-10. (2011)
  
  
• Dominic Furniss, Jonathan Back & Ann Blandford
  Resilience in emergency medical despatch: Big R and little r Appeared in Proceedings of "Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare", Atlanta, GA, 2010

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@inproceedings{HT39,
   title = {Towards Dependable Number Entry for Medical Devices},
   author = {Harold Thimbleby and Abigail Cauchi and Paul Curzon and Parisa Eslambolchilar and Andy Gimblett and Huayi Huang and Paul Lee and Yunqiu Li and Paolo Masci and Patrick Oladimeji and Rimvydas {Ruk\v{s}\.{e}nas}},
   abstract = {Number entry is an ubiquitous task in medical devices, but is implemented in many different ways, from decimal keypads to seemingly simple up/down buttons. Operator manuals often do not give clear and complete explanations, and all approaches have subtle variations, with details varying from device to device. This paper explores the design issues, critiques designs, and shows that methods have advantages and disadvantages, particularly in terms of undetected error rates.},
   year = {2011},
   booktitle = {Proceedings {ACM SIGCHI} Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems ({EICS}): Engineering Interactive Computing Systems for Medicine and Health Care},
   pages = {53--58},
   publisher = {ACM},
   location = {Pisa, Italy}
}

CHI+MED videos and blogposts
• The Comedy of (Human) Error and Resilience (14 March 2012) chi+med blog post highlighting the video of Dom Furniss's bitesize lecture on error and resilience, given as part of the UCL lunchtime lecture series. You can watch the video below (hover over video and click on full screen to enlarge, or click on red icon to watch on YouTube).



• "Be prepared" (23 March 2012) and Undies in the safe (15 March 2012) are two posts, from Prof Ann Blandford's blog, which look at everyday resilience and someone's repertoire of knowledge and skills as well as their error-avoiding tactics.

Keywords: Situation, cognition, resilience engineering.
Key people: Dominic Furniss, Jonathan Back