Patient Safety Challenges in the Pandemic: Applying Human Factors Principles to Embed Patient Safety and Experience at the Clinical Front Line

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified systemic gaps in patient safety, including social frailty for vulnerable populations such as older adults (Briguglio et al., 2020). Public health measures, such as prolonged and frequent lockdowns, restricted access to visitors and support networks and in extreme cases led to confinement within a single room, The negative impact of these restrictions has focused new attention on social frailty, which has hitherto been a somewhat neglected patient safety issue. Since social frailty is a multifaceted construct, it needs to be considered in a variety of settings and from a range of disciplinary perspectives. This practitioner-led panel consisting of an internist, a human factors engineer, an occupational therapist, and an implementation scientist, examines the impact of the pandemic on social interaction, and social frailty amongst older people in three different settings (hospital, long term care home, community). Through a set of case studies, the panelists provided applied experiences and perspectives on the impact of the pandemic on patient safety and on social frailty in particular. The panel covered theory, and real-world application of human factors principles. The question of how to design safety into the healthcare system were also explored. In this paper we review the problem of social frailty, list some brief case studies and discuss possible intervention strategies.