Hospitals only achieve a high level of patient safety if the workplaces of all their employees are optimally designed. Things can become life-threatening when doctors and nursing staff have not been properly trained – or when unnecessary interruptions in the operating room cause mistakes. Dr. Carsten Ostendorp at the Center for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in Hospitals, ZAK (German: Zentrum für Arbeitspsychologie und Organisationspsychologie in Kliniken) spoke about this topic with MEDICA.de. Dr. Ostendorp, how did the collaboration with hospitals come to be?Carsten P. Ostendorp: The idea originated with a doctor friend of mine who frequently complained about hospital situations that pertained to the collaboration between the physician team or advanced and continuing education for example. I offered my professional expertise since industrial and organizational psychology provides options to work on the various issues that play a significant role in hospitals. In this concrete example, the hospital complained that it was not able to provide expert advanced and continuing education for its resident physicians. That’s why we began to take a look at the structures and processes from an industry psychology perspective. In this instance, we focus on the work task a physician or a team needs to handle. We put it into a systemic correlation. We refer to ”human-technology-organization“ in this case. The methods of industrial psychology that we use in this sociotechnical approach to human-technology-organization are highly evidence-based and able to prove effectiveness.
Read the whole interview with Dr. Ostendorp at MEDICA-tradefair.com!