Adapting interfaces to induce behaviour change and mitigate the negative effects of interruptions in safety critical healthcare settings

Williams, Craig

Abstract

Due to the fast-paced, dynamic, and sometimes unpredictable nature of the environment’s healthcare professionals work within, it is inevitable that task interruptions will occur. Such clinical task interruptions are consistently cited as a contributing factor to the manifestation of clinical errors. Various theoretical approaches to exploring task interruptions and their varying characteristics have provided valuable insights into their role in task performance (positive and negative). Furthermore, applied research has revealed the complex nature of trying to understand task interruptions within safety critical, multifaceted working environments such as healthcare. Bridging an evidential gap in the literature with theoretically informed studies using developed tasks (primary and interrupting) with a level of ecological validity is an important step to understanding the nature of task interruptions in healthcare and can guide work towards developing interventions that are beneficial towards appropriate handling of task interruptions in healthcare.

Through an exploratory study and a series of six experiments the following thesis develops a more ecological primary (procedural memory drug administration task) and interruption task (clinical decision-making task) that mimics those likely to be used daily by healthcare professionals. The parameters of the task and performance are explored through interruption manipulations that mimic those healthcare professionals are likely to experience (e.g., including interruption complexity, frequency, and source), whilst also considering unique characteristics of the healthcare environment (e.g., interruption urgency, and emotional valance of interruption). Key findings include positive emotionally valanced interruptions increasing error rates, urgent interruptions have more of a profound effect on performance and reducing information access costs significantly reduces task errors following an interruption. Findings using experimental tasks progresses the healthcare interruption literature in providing novel insight into the nature of task interruptions in healthcare, and the potential role the ecological nature the tasks may have on performance. Furthermore, adopting a different approach to explore task interruptions in healthcare allows for the exploration of novel interventions and their utility in mitigating the negative effects of interruptions. Interventions are explored in the final experiment, whereby the cost of accessing information is manipulated to induce an implicit cognitive behavioural change whereby such behavioural changes may be protective to the negative effects of task interruptions. Taken together, this work has made significant contributions to the current literature through extrapolating results to the context that the experiments are meant to probe (e.g., healthcare medication administration), thus providing additional utility when considering designs to mitigate the profound effects of task interruptions that are representative of that context.

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Oct 4, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 14, 2023
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/7864619
• Award Date: Apr 14, 2023