Work Domain Analysis for understanding medication safety in care homes in England: an exploratory study

TY - JOUR

T1 - Work Domain Analysis for understanding medication safety in care homes in England

T2 - an exploratory study

AU - Lim, Rosemary H M

AU - Anderson, Janet E.

AU - Buckle, Peter W.

PY - 2015/7/28

Y1 - 2015/7/28

N2 - Medication safety and errors are a major concern in care homes. In addition to the identification of incidents, there is a need for a comprehensive system description to avoid the danger of introducing interventions that have unintended consequences and are therefore unsustainable. The aim of this study was to explore the impact and uniqueness of Work Domain Analysis (WDA) to facilitate an in-depth understanding of medication safety problems within the care home system and identify the potential benefits of WDA to design safety interventions to improve medication safety. A comprehensive, systematic and contextual overview of the care home medication system was developed for the first time. The novel use of the abstraction hierarchy (AH) to analyse medication errors revealed the value of the AH to guide a comprehensive analysis of errors and generate system improvement recommendations that took into account the contextual information of the wider system.

AB - Medication safety and errors are a major concern in care homes. In addition to the identification of incidents, there is a need for a comprehensive system description to avoid the danger of introducing interventions that have unintended consequences and are therefore unsustainable. The aim of this study was to explore the impact and uniqueness of Work Domain Analysis (WDA) to facilitate an in-depth understanding of medication safety problems within the care home system and identify the potential benefits of WDA to design safety interventions to improve medication safety. A comprehensive, systematic and contextual overview of the care home medication system was developed for the first time. The novel use of the abstraction hierarchy (AH) to analyse medication errors revealed the value of the AH to guide a comprehensive analysis of errors and generate system improvement recommendations that took into account the contextual information of the wider system.

KW - care homes

KW - human factors

KW - medication safety

KW - nursing homes

KW - patient safety

KW - Work Domain Analysis

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84938099111&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/00140139.2015.1057542

DO - 10.1080/00140139.2015.1057542

M3 - Article

SN - 0014-0139

JO - Ergonomics

JF - Ergonomics

ER -