Leading Quality

Human Factors as Healthcare’s Secret Advantage: How an Open Door and a Tiny Tube Revealed System Flaws

Jason Meadows, MD Season 1 Episode 6

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A door swinging open in the OR. A tiny defect in IV tubing. Both seem trivial—until you realize they expose how fragile our systems really are.

In this episode, Allie Muniak, Executive Director of Health System Improvement at Health Quality BC, shows how human factors turns everyday frustration into lifesaving insight. We follow her path from psychology to system redesign, uncovering how design, teamwork, and curiosity prevent harm long before checklists or policies do.

Allie explains what human factors really means in healthcare—how people, technology, and environments interact under real-world pressure. She shares how normalizing observation as learning (not policing) helped surgical teams transform the safety checklist from a compliance tool into a culture of attention, anticipation, and role clarity.

Then, a gripping case study: ICU nurses reporting spontaneous over-infusions after a new pump rollout. Rather than defaulting to “retrain the user,” a multidisciplinary team dug deeper—partnering with engineers and vendors to discover a hidden tubing defect that led to a global recall of hundreds of millions of sets. It’s a powerful example of how listening to the front line and rejecting blame can reshape safety worldwide.

We close with lessons for every leader: slow down to see work as it’s really done, balance reactive review with proactive learning, and design systems that support clinicians instead of constraining them.

If you care about real root cause analysis and systems that make the right action the easy one, this episode is for you.


🔗 Additional Resources

  • Health Quality BC – Learn more about the organization’s work in system improvement and patient safety:
    ➡️ https://healthqualitybc.ca/

  • Allie Muniak – Executive Director, Health System Improvement, HQBC
    ➡️ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/allisonmuniak/?skipRedirect=true

    ➡️ Health Quality BC: https://healthqualitybc.ca/about-us/meet-our-team/allison-muniak/

📚 Mentioned in This Episode

  • The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande — the seminal book behind the global surgical safety checklist movement.
    👉 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6667514-the-checklist-manifesto
  • Safety-I and Safety-II Framework (Erik Hollnagel) — foundational ideas for balancing reactive reviews with proactive learning.
    👉 https://www.england.nhs.uk/signuptosafety/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2015/10/safety-1-safety-2-whte-papr.pdf

  • World Health Organization: Surgical Safety Checklist — global reference tool for surgical teamwork and communication.
    👉 https://www.who.int/teams/integrated-health-services/patient-safety/research/safe-surgery
SPEAKER_00:

I think right now across Canada, we're in an unprecedented time with challenges and uncertainty within healthcare. I do think that now more than ever, us listening into what is happening at the point of care, what the experience of patients is, but also what our clinical teams are experiencing and how we can help design the system to help them.

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Leading Quality, the podcast spotlighting the people moving healthcare forward from the front lines to the C suite. I'm your host, Jason Meadows. Today's guest is Ali Muniac, the Executive Director of Health System Improvement at Health Quality British Columbia. Ali brings a rare and powerful mix of psychology, human factors engineering, and deep healthcare quality experience. Her work spans from observing surgical teams in action to uncovering hidden technical flaws in medical devices. She's led major system scale safety investigations, most notably discovering a defect in infusion pump tubing that triggered a global recall by partnering clinical, engineering, and vendor teams to dig beyond the usual refrain of just retraining the frontline staff to finding the real root causes. At HealthQuality BC, Allie now leads efforts across primary care, mental health, long-term care, and physician administrative burden. Bringing those frontline details to system leaders. She's someone who refuses to accept the usual line in healthcare that says that's just how it's done. And she's passionate about building systems that support clinicians, not constrain them. Allie, it's a pleasure to have you on Leading Quality.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01:

The pleasure's all mine. And you and I have known each other for a little while. We got to uh do a professional development program together a few years ago. But I I love to I'd love to dive a little more into kind of your background. And so can you uh tell us a bit about your journey, kind of what drew you from a bachelor's degree in psychology and then human factors engineering and how that led you into healthcare quality improvement?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, absolutely. I think anyone who I have talked to about human factors engineering has a unique journey and how they've discovered the science and the area and the discipline. And so mine also, I never went to university thinking I'd be a specialist in human factors. Started in the typical pre-med program, and uh then fell into a human factors course in my undergraduate in psychology at the University of Calgary. I fell in love with the discipline and I found it easy and interesting. And um, I had an opportunity to work with um some great mentors, um, Dr. Jeff Carrot and Dr. Jan Davies at the University of Calgary, and slowly shifted my area of focus into human factors. And so had the opportunity to then pursue a grad graduate degree um at the University of Toronto under uh the mentorship of Dr. Paul Milgram. And it was my career just kind of took off from there. So it was an area that I find that human factors becomes part of everything that I do, an area that I think is super important for um the healthcare system.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And so I've met other types of engineers in the healthcare space who've done through, gone through um industrial engineering, process engineering, that kind of stuff. And a lot of them went into that knowing that it was a discipline they could apply to something like manufacturing, just like they could to healthcare and otherwise. Was yours a specific, did it become a specific focus towards healthcare? Or was there a period there where you were thinking you might do human factors research in in other disciplines?

SPEAKER_00:

So I actually started my human factors journey in the psychology department. So I'm not an engineer, but I did do my graduate work in engineering. What I ended up starting in is actually transportation safety. So working at the University of Calgary, we had a full car simulator, and we would be at that time doing different research studies on novice drivers and elderly drivers. We also did a lot of studies around cell phone use in driving, which was a big thing at that point in time before legislation was in place and uh went from there. So I shifted um when we were doing transportation safety at that time, uh, when I was in Calgary, there was also an opportunity to be exposed to some areas in healthcare. And that was my area of passion. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

That's great. So, like a lot of us in the quality improvement world found uh an interesting way to stumble into it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and there was um there was a big um event within Calgary um around a mix-up of potassium chloride and sodium chloride. Um, and so at that point in time, um, there was some opportunity to be involved in just some different types of reviews and understanding some of the human factors requirements to medication management, um, mislabeling and other different areas around infusion pumps and how they actually work within healthcare environments. So it felt like I kind of fell into it, but then very quickly uh found that it was very interesting. It was very needed in healthcare. And there was a big opportunity to really bring that human factors expertise into working in partnership with clinicians on identifying how we can make the health system safer.

SPEAKER_01:

When you first entered where your training wasn't in kind of an explicit healthcare provision discipline, what did you think about working with clinical people about how clinical systems were designed? Do you remember some of those first impressions you had?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, there was a couple. And when I first started, I had great um advice from Dr. Jan Davies, who was a practicing anesthesiologist at that time. And what she said to me was for my career, if I was to work in healthcare, it would be very important for me to partner and have strong partnerships with clinical individuals, bringing my expertise and bringing their expertise together. I think one of the things that I found so surprising was just the conversations around, well, this is just the way that things are done. So the number of interviews or meetings is like, well, this is just the way we've always done it. So I kind of got this uh drive to really challenge the status quo and be curious with individuals around, well, how can we potentially make things better for you?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And that that has led you to ultimately to your current role as an executive director with Health Quality British Columbia. For listeners who might not be familiar, uh, what is Health Quality BC and how does it fit into a landscape of provincial care? Are you providing direct patient care or is it uh is it something other than that?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so health quality BC, we're arm's length to the health authorities and to the Ministry of Health. And so what our value is, is that we have um an impartiality to how we can actually look at the health system. So our key purpose is to improve health care quality across British Columbia. So we're a provincial entity, and we our main driver is to really bring health system partners together to accelerate action on key quality of care issues within the province. So this could look a whole bunch of different ways. It's system-wide impact through things like reactive or retrospective types of things where there's like patient safety concerns, or how we're actually driving quality improvement forward through innovative thinking, evidence-informed strategies, and areas where we can really shift the culture and improve clinical practice. So the opportunity, why I love this organization and um enjoy working here so much is that it provides that holistic view of the system, but we have the opportunity to really work at or work with individuals from point of care to leadership and management to executive, board, and ministry, as well as other external partners like doctors at BC and MPBC, et cetera.

SPEAKER_01:

How do these projects kind of come through the door? Are you embedded in hospitals working in some of the same hospitals all the time and new projects emerge? Or how are those priorities coming in and how are they set?

SPEAKER_00:

So we try to align our priorities with um key mandate components out of the ministry, but also um having our ear to the ground with our partners at the point of care and within the health authorities around what are emerging areas of concern or consistent areas that we need to be um raising the attention of and that uh need to be prioritized within operational prioritization.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Shifting gears a little bit to kind of your present work, you've talked uh about the importance of how people interact with tools, not just the fact that the tools exist. And you and I talked a little bit offline about your work in surgical safety checklists. I'm curious what that looked like and and how the, you know, how you use the tool versus just having the tool was uh became a rough concept for you.

SPEAKER_00:

So I started actually when I moved to British Columbia, um, I met uh Dr. Doug Conquerin at that time. And um, this was in around 2008, and we had an interest both in making surgical safety better and safer. And so at that point in time, Atul Gwandi's work was uh emerging around the surgical safety checklist and the work with the World Health Organization. And so it seemed like a natural area to uh focus on. We also did a bunch of work around bringing some of those human factors components into the system as well. And so looking at things like non-technical skills and how teams actually function. And so, in hindsight, looking back to it, a lot of the work was very much about introducing a tool like a checklist and the implementation of that tool. But there weren't as many conversations around the how the tool is used with complex teams and how those conversations are so important to increase things like situation awareness, problem solving, anticipatory types of behavior around anticipating what the potential risks are within this space, and then how a team could potentially um respond to um with like role clarity and how they would potentially respond to things that were coming up.

SPEAKER_01:

And so when you when you did this work, one thing you shared with me was that you watched cases in the OR, I'm guessing on video, and you looked at 300 plus cases looking for important features of how people carried out the checklist. Tell me about that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so it started with uh, I'll say with Doug's vision. And he uh unfortunately he did pass away last year, but I know he is okay with me sharing this. But our first conversation that him and I had was him reviewing video of a surgical procedure he had been completing with one of his fellows. And there was a conversation around what the two sets of hands were doing within that technical case. And he provided feedback to his fellow uh based upon what he thought was an improvement on that one set of hands. And what he realized was it was actually his set of hands that um he should have been providing the improvement to. And so what he said to me when we started this conversation was he asked me, would I be willing to come and do some shadow shifts within the operating room with him? Because what he said is I don't know what else I'm missing and what I'm not seeing from the larger team. And so he was one of the first people that I had interacted with who was very, very aware but curious about what those non-technical components, how they were potentially impacting his cases in a positive way or potentially in a way that was uh potentially decreasing the safety of the case. So we started um doing observations just by looking at having a third, like kind of a fly on the wall type of approach. And I know that there's like much more technical ways of doing this, but we wanted to slowly make this and normalize it for the team members of bringing in people to observe in a curious way, as opposed to it being a punitive or a technical type of review. So we started by actually looking at how many times the doors open and closed in the operating room, which sounds kind of simple, but it was actually fascinating from a culture perspective around how the doors open and closed, the conversations that happened. Technically, that the HFAC system probably wasn't keeping up with the number of times the doors opened and closed within the space. But we did 30 cases looking at that. Um, and then what we did was once people were comfortable with um having an observer in the room, knowing that that observer was not looking at individual factors of performance, but more on that system level opportunity uh for looking for opportunities for improvement. And then we shifted to things like the surgical safety checklist. So, how are people doing briefings? How are they doing timeouts? How are they mobilizing the team before the procedure begins? And then how are they doing and preparing that handoff to perioperative um like recovery rooms and so and so forth?

SPEAKER_01:

And I can imagine, I mean, you've gotten so into the weeds there in terms of doors opening and closing, you know, the eye contact, the uh the using the uh the checklist and using it well or using it as a a checkbox, you know, purely as a as a as a checkbox in your day. I love diving into these conversations, and I'm realizing we haven't taken the time to kind of define what human factors is for people who might not be as initiated. Can you, you know, given what you've just described, can you tell us how, like, what is human factors and how does a human factors um engineering person think?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so human factors is a large discipline. And so the high-level definition that I like to use is by Alphonse Schiphanis. And what he says is it's really around um the human characteristics of how teams, systems, tasks, jobs, environments all come together. And so um, what we want to do is really understand both the physical characteristics, but also the human characteristics of how a system works. And so these human abilities, human limitations, and other human characteristics that are relevant to design are things that could be both the physical interactions, which we're very familiar with with things like ergonomics, but it's also the cognitive component, so how people respond, the decision making, the reaction times, the information processing that people do, and then the team dynamics on top of it. And so I think what's unique about human factors is that there's a variety of different ways to get involved in the area. So some people have a straight psychology background, some have a straight engineering background, some have gone through computer science programs, and then there's some of us who have a mix of two or three of those different types of disciplines. There's also areas like human kinetics and anatomy types of areas as well. So I think what's helpful in this area is that it often brings a variety of different expertise from different areas together to really understand how people and technology and the physical environment and teams all come together. And so you can focus in on one or two of the components, or you can focus in on like a larger area within that space.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I'm reminded as you're talking about uh essentially what you're talking about is is uh systems thinking and you know, envisioning, you know, this is something that has gained a lot of traction, but I think depending on where you go and who you talk to in healthcare, the idea of systems thinking as a part of your your regular work is is maybe a novel concept. And I wonder if that's kind of one of the challenges in demonstrating value, in getting in the door for uh like to work with healthcare people is just to to um you know present yourself as an expert in systems and an expert in how the human and the infrastructural and the other components of a system are working together and that that additional expertise, which I'm very bought into, but that that additional expertise is needed.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, and it's something, you know, I've thought about it often, and um, and when I've talked with other human factors experts about this, what I find so interesting is that many of the things that we're identifying often feel like common sense in an environment, but when things aren't working well or when you're frustrated, it often comes across as like a very strong emotional response. Like, you know, when you turn on the wrong element of the stove and you take that personally, or you get frustrated, or you mix up something with like an ETM machine and the buttons aren't where you expect it, or if you're paying for parking, like there's all of these things within our physical environments and our day-to-day environments that we either just accept or we just assume that there's going to be some level of frustration and um challenge.

SPEAKER_01:

You were very generous in using those examples and not the the one that you and I just encountered together, which was in trying to hit record. I was logged in as a guest to uh to this platform and uh had to log myself back in as the uh as the host. So I feel that frustration. I felt it just a minute ago. That's that's great. With another powerful story from your career, uh has to do with continuous infusion pumps and a really important finding that you had, which led to a really big global impact, even beyond, I think, where you thought it would go. Tell me about that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's interesting that infusion pumps. I I started my career with infusion pumps in the University of Calgary, where we were evaluating the different infusion pumps that could potentially um come into the health system there. Um, and more on the procurement side and the usability side and identifying where there was potentially like safety um factors that needed to be considered. But I worked for 15 years at Vancouver Coastal Health and loved my experience there. And one of the things that came up in um around 2018 was that we were implementing a new infusion pump into the health authority. And at that point in time, we also started to identify uh some safety concerns with over-infusion events that were happening. And they were spontaneous over-infusion events. And this occurred by an ICU nurse coming to our office and identifying that this was a concern and that they were quite worried about this. So, one of the things that was so interesting is that it was a multidisciplinary team that came together where we had uh quality and safety and human factors, we had professional practice with nursing, we had our medical staff, um, we have biomedical engineering, and we also had our risk department come together, as well as the point of care clinicians and identifying what could potentially be happening. We also partnered with the vendor who was like super responsive and wanting to work collaboratively on trying to solve this. Now, the thing that was so interesting about this was the initial response was going to that individual factor. So it must have been something that the nurse had programmed. And so the nurses, the recommendation initially from the vendor was to just require more training. And we know from the hierarchy of effectiveness that training is one of the least effective methods of improvement in a system. And I'll be honest, I didn't think it was a training issue. And so knowing that we had our highly trained critical care nurses having problems with loading the tubing seemed like a bigger system concern and a bigger issue with the actual technology. So it took us some time and it was very unsettling because we didn't actually know what the issue was, but through a variety of different tests, and actually one of the nurses identifying an overinfusion event, being able to very quickly take the device and remove the device from the patient and keeping the integrity of the device, we were able to actually, with our biomedical engineering partners, identify what the potential issue was. Um, and so they did a whole host of different things that included actually in partnership with the vendor doing uh a micro CT scan of the tubing set and identified a huge concentricity uh issue with the tubing. And what that means is that if you think of something looking like an equal Cheerio or a donut, there was one wall that was very thick and one that was very thin. And when you use that with the device, it could impact the occlusion of how the tubing set would work within the pump. Now, this was fascinating for me and for the team because it really showed that it was a technical issue or a quality control issue with the tubing set that somebody couldn't identify with their own eyes. And so a clinician would be guessing because they wouldn't be able to actually determine if there was an issue with the tubing. What ended up happening was that the tubing sets were recalled, the vendor was involved with the recall as well, and globally hundreds of million tubing sets were recalled. And so it's one of the um areas like this was me in partnership with a variety of different people. This was the success of this was because we were an interdisciplinary team. But um I think this one highlighted to me that the importance of listening to your point of care team members. And when something doesn't feel right, that the first response shouldn't necessarily be that somebody requires more training, but actually to dig a little bit deeper into this uh to the issue to see if we could actually solve a larger safety concern.

SPEAKER_01:

I think a lot of our audience could relate to a lot of the the themes that are coming up in what you're what you're sharing here. You know, the the idea that I think so many of us who have gotten into healthcare by any route are you know, have gone through a lot of education. And there is a strong inclination we all have to say, first of all, as you as you mentioned, to have the responsibility rest very heavily with individuals. And so if there was a problem, it was at the individual level, not at the population or system level. And then to uh to think that education will be the answer and maybe to skip some of those steps that we know to do, looking at root cause analysis, for example, by various modalities, and instead just saying, okay, well, let's retrain them. Was this team that you're describing, were were they, you know, naturally just able to say let's push beyond training, training, training? Were they all thinking that? Or was it a r was that one of the challenges to success here? Was actually pushing people to not think in that limited training first kind of way?

SPEAKER_00:

It was definitely a team who is very systems focused. And so I think um in healthcare, especially in a quality and safety role, you have a whole host of different things that are coming up that are tend to be a reactive situation related to either patient safety or quality of care or overall experience. Um for this, I think it was really building trust within the clinical team members as well as a team that was willing to investigate. Now, our investigation took over nine months to figure out this actual problem. And so we did start with training, and it was around the framing to the point of care clinicians around we want to try this training. We're not 100% sure this is the training issue, but can you work with us? And we made it very collaborative. Um, we had weekly meetings where we had on-site um discussions, we had forum meetings, we had emails to really uh overly communicate and um build the trust. And I think the thing that was so interesting in this situation was it was actually a point of care nurse actually recording the event happening and realizing what was going on. Um, so responding, recording, and then um being able to work collaboratively with us around the identification of an issue and then having the trust that there was a team able to respond and um help problem solve it, and that it wasn't rate back to the individual being involved with the issue.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it sounds like incredible learning. And uh the fact that you had a system with enough psychological safety that this nurse was able to freely report this. And and I I would guess that after he or she reported the uh the issue, that other nurses probably came forward and said, Oh yeah, I've seen that too.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, and we had proactively had the conversation as well. And so I think what was concerning for us is that when we started to dive into identifying this issue, we weren't the only ones that had had this issue. That I think this issue had been going on for many years, but it tended to go back to the individual having to actually load the tubing and not the actual technical piece of it. I think the part that it spoke to for me is the importance of trust and transparency in a system. And so all of us have different roles to play in a health system, but the importance is like really trusting and respecting your point of care clinicians and also your point of care clinicians having that trust and respect and connection with other members, um, like either support services or leadership or even your executive teams. Um, because they were really responsive in this example for us.

SPEAKER_01:

Congratulations again on that success. It sounds like it was profound and like global recall that you know saved probably uh, you know, a really hard it's hard to imagine how many lives might have been saved by that recall. Now to kind. of reflect a little bit. So one of the the themes of this podcast is is about leadership and how we lead quality. And I'm wondering now that you've had such a a strong career up until now, what what's the most common mistake that you see leaders of all stripes, whether it's clinicians or non-clinicians, what is the what are the mistakes that you see leaders making when uh when they try to improve quality and safety?

SPEAKER_00:

That's a good question. I think for me it would be two things. So one is giving yourself the time to really listen and be curious. I find often in operational roles they're so taxing and so time consuming and there's so much coming at leaders specifically that it often tends to be just checking things off your list. And it's really hard to make time and space to like really listen and hear and even watch and shadow what's actually happening within the environments and and how care is being provided and what that experience is for patients, what that experience is for the providers and the staff and how we can potentially do better. I think the other one that I think is super important is it's very easy to focus on the negative and not focus in on what's going well. And for me, you know there's a lot of work around safety one and safety two, which is um with Eric Honnegel and um really looking at like so safety one being like retrospective or like reactive and safety two being like anticipate anticipating and looking at how things are going well in the system. But I think for me identifying where things are going well and how you can scale and spread what's working well as opposed to fixing what is wrong all the time is a really important area with leadership.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. This is the the uh book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnman is that what you're referring to?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah there's a variety of different um like academic books and other books as well that like talk about that as well. And yeah fast and slow is key. I think it's I know when in COVID it was like working 14, 16 hour days and just it being a complete blur and getting so much done but then also making sure that you're supporting your team that you are aware of what's happening within the environment and that you're anticipating in a way that isn't just leaving people behind.

SPEAKER_01:

Looking ahead what are your aspirations for Health Quality BC and and your work there what what excites you about uh what lies ahead well I think right now uh across Canada we're in an unprecedented time with challenges and uncertainty within healthcare and so I do think that there is a lot of opportunity to showcase what's working well, the highlighting areas of success.

SPEAKER_00:

But also I think for me with Health Quality BC, some of the areas that I think are super important for us is really expanding our dimensions of quality so really focusing in on how we provide quality of care across the province. I know we're doing some work within patient safety again, but patient safety in a way that brings in what I just mentioned around really looking in what's working well within the system, how do we scale and spread that and how do we proactively make things as safe as possible rather than just focusing solely on reviews and events and they need to happen together. But you can't have one without the other I think.

SPEAKER_01:

I can imagine there's some maybe some barriers to to being proactive when there's so much that there's so many tasks you can react to.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, absolutely and so I think it's making the space to do a little bit of that focus in on what's working well I think building that trust and transparency in the system is key. And I do think that now more than ever us listening into what is happening at the point of care, what the experience of patients is but also what our clinical teams are experiencing and how we can help design a system to help them not feel like they are restricted in the work that they're doing, but that we are integrating technology in a way that makes sense, that we're not putting up burdens and like administrative challenges that make things hard for people to do the right thing.

SPEAKER_01:

I love that. And I think that's a great place to round out the conversation I'm so grateful to you for for having this conversation with me today. And I'm glad that I got to selfishly kind of deepen my own knowledge of human factors and of your story. If listeners want to follow your work or get in touch um what would be the best way for them to connect with you?

SPEAKER_00:

They can go to our website at healthqualitybc and our emails contact is on there as well and you're feel free to email me or to reach out to our organization we'd be more than happy to share what we're doing. We have lots of free resources and try to share as much of what we do so that other people in the province within Canada and even globally can utilize the tools and things that we've developed.

SPEAKER_01:

That's great. Ali thanks so much again for your time it was great having you today. Thanks Jason thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Leading Quality. If you enjoyed the show please take a moment to like subscribe and share it with someone who might find it useful. You can find all our episodes at leadingqualitybugsprout dot com or in your favorite podcast app. The show is written and hosted by me Jason Meadows edited by Milan Milosafievich and produced by Thrive Healthcare Improvement. See you next time last

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