Designing better healthcare using human psychology: Judgement and decision science in clinical settings

In this session, we will introduce the fundamentals of decision making and examine the risks and opportunities that a better understanding of human behaviour exposes in clinical settings. 

We'll be joined by members of The Behavioural Insights Team, a social purpose organisation which applies behavioural insights to help improve policy. Some of BIT's recent work in healthcare has included:

• Reducing unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions by 73,000 by informing GP practices when they were prescribing many more antibiotics than their peers
  
  
• Improving hospital appointment attendance by 25% by designing text message reminders which emphasise the cost of the appointment to the NHS

In recent decades, developments in the behavioural sciences have rapidly advanced our knowledge of how people make decisions and judge information. Humans have developed sophisticated ways of processing complex information quickly, which sometimes force us to trade-off speed for accuracy.

Doctors are no exception to this rule, with recent research highlighting that contextual cues can influence prescribing behaviours, specialist referrals, medical error incidence, and much more.

Join us to:

• Take part in interactive exercises to show how the human brain works, where judgement and decision making predictably go wrong, and what this can mean in practice
• Build familiarity with examples of how behavioural science has been applied to improve clinical environments and processes
• Reflect on the opportunities to use this approach in your own workplace, and provide a framework to do so.  

You can view the full programme below.