FAST Session: Human Factors in Critical Care Transport: Examining Heuristic Traps

This presentation focuses on how human factors influence decision making and can lead to errors in clinical medicine and backcountry expeditions. It outlines four heuristic traps that we unknowingly fall victim to at work and in the outdoors. This talk will discuss examples of how they relate to clinical decision making while telling the sad tale of Fred Fredrickson and James Osborne as they fell victim to these human factors in their backcountry tragedy in New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest. This will generate self-reflection into our everyday practice helping further mitigate complacency and accident. We will look at the mental models built through the course of our career and identify the importance of when they need to be modified to adapt to certain situations.

Speaker: Robert O'Donnell, FP-C, WP-C