Human Factors in low vision affecting patient and provider

Description

Katharine Siobhan Kotze

Siobhan Kotze is a registered midwife, human factors educator, and safety investigator with extensive experience working across complex healthcare systems. She has over eight years’ clinical experience in the NHS in the UK, including labour ward, community and inpatient care, and has held senior roles focused on fetal wellbeing and patient safety. Alongside her clinical background, she works as an expert witness in medico-legal cases, analysing healthcare delivery through a systems and human factors lens.

Siobhan is in the final stages of completing her research for a Masters in Safety and Accident Investigation, with a particular interest in how human factors, teamwork, communication, workload and system design influence patient outcomes. Her work draws on contemporary safety science approaches, including human factors engineering and systems thinking, to move beyond individual blame and towards understanding how care environments shape behaviour and decision-making.

She has a strong interest in applying human factors principles to real-world clinical practice, particularly in resource-constrained settings and small multidisciplinary teams. Her work focuses on practical, proportionate interventions that improve safety, reliability and patient experience without adding unnecessary burden to clinicians.

In this webinar, Siobhan will introduce key human factors concepts and explore how they are directly relevant to eye care and low vision services in the South African context, across both public and private healthcare, with a focus on everyday clinical realities and team dynamics.