Associate Professor Mirjam Ekstedt: Safety I and safety II

Expressions of resilience in complex adaptive systems

Groups related to this event

Centre for Health Informatics
Centre for Health Systems and Safety Research
Centre for Healthcare Resilience and Implementation Science

Event date

Tuesday, 9 December 2014

In Sweden, converging economic, technical, and socio-political agendas promote shifting care from medical facilities to the patient's home. This shift is intended to increase quality of life and make care more efficient, but it may also generate new risks. We studied the organization and coordination of specialized palliative home-care units over a couple of years, with specific foci on sense-making and communications between clinicians and managers in order to advance the understanding of resilience engineering in complex adaptive systems.

Scenarios from these studies form the foundation for a discussion on methodology to capture resilience in real work, and how new insight on resilience engineering can be drawn from a naturally occurring event in advanced home care.

Inferences drawn on resilience, resilience expression and resilience engineering that will be discussed during the seminar are among others:

• What we recognize as resilience is an expression of resilience
• Expressions of resilience are pay-offs for prior investments in resilience
• Resilience expression creates a teleological bridge between the disturbance and the higher-level goals of the system
• Resilience engineering is the creation of sufficient systemic degrees of freedom and the presence of people capable of exploiting them in purposeful ways

Speaker profile

Mirjam Ekstedt, RN is associate professor in systems safety in health-care organizations at the system safety and organization department at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. Mirjam gained her PhD in Psychosocial Medicine at Karolinska Institutet on human factor interactions (sleep, stress and fatigue) and effects on health and performance in working life. Her ongoing research has a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach, using mixed methods in explorative basic research; clinical trials and in implementation and dissemination studies. Focus is on human-technology – organisation interfaces in complex health care systems; resilience engineering and continuity of care across multiple sites; and the role of Information Communication Technology, ICT support in care at home or at distance, including the role of patients’ and family caregivers’ participation in care.

Where: Seminar Room Level 1, 75 Talavera Rd, Macquarie University (map reference)

When: Tuesday 9 December, 2014

Time: 12noon -1pm

Cost: Free

Contact: jackie.mullins@mq.edu.au or call 9850 2407