Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is a well known and widely used method in industry to carry out pro-active risk assessment.
In 2001 the National Center for Patient Safety of the United States’ Department of Veterans’ Affairs adapted FMEA to the healthcare situation. Healthcare Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (HFMEA) has since then been used in the their hospitals and clinics.
In 2004 the UMC Utrecht succesfully carried out a pilot with HFMEA.
In 2005, hospital management has included HFMEA in the hospital-wide patient safety program and has made it mandatory for each division to do one HFMEA of a self-picked high risk healthcare process annually.
For information on the background of HFMEA and how it works, please refer to relevant pages on the website of the National Center for Patient Safety (NCPS) of the United States’ Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Link at the bottom of this page.
The information on this site about HFMEA has been presented at the Annual Conference of the European Association of Cognitive Ergonomics, 2005.