Applying Human Factors and the Resident Assessment Instrument - Home Care: An Examination of Failure Modes, Causes, Effects and Recommendations in the Home Care Environment

Several analytical techniques including use case diagrams, process flow diagrams (PFDs), hierarchical task analysis (HTA), failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), systematic human error reduction and prediction approach (SHERPA), hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP), heuristics, the Safe Living Guide and the Resident Assessment Instrument – Home Care (RAI-HC) are applied to data obtained from two pilot home visits to determine whether common failure modes, causes, effects and recommendations are yielded by the techniques. The time required to apply each analytical technique to processes uncovered from the pilot data was measured and outputs of the techniques were reviewed for commonality. Of the tools considered, SHERPA was found to return the most failure modes, effects and recommendations, while FMEA was the only human factors tool to yield causes. Additionally, FMEA and SHERPA provided a means of ranking potential failure modes based on severity and probability.