Rate My Professor Janet Anderson

Professor Janet Anderson is Professor of Human Factors in the Department of Anaesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine, School of Translational Medicine, within the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University. Her disciplinary background is psychology. She holds a Bachelor of Behavioural Science (Honours) in Psychology from La Trobe University (1986), a Master of Psychology from La Trobe University (1999), a PhD in Psychology from the University of Queensland (2004), and a Postgraduate Certificate of Academic Practice (2007). Early in her career, she contributed to human factors research in road safety. She held academic positions at the University of Surrey, City, University of London, and King's College London for 12 years, where she led research on patient safety and quality improvement in partnership with major London hospitals and established the Centre for Applied Resilience in Healthcare (CARe), which developed tools and methods for quality improvement drawing on resilient healthcare principles.

Professor Anderson's research aims to enhance the quality and safety of healthcare through human factors and psychological approaches, focusing on systems thinking to support safe human performance. Her interests include patient safety, adaptive health systems, teamwork, communication, simulation and transition to practice in medicine, clinical education, and applying Resilient Healthcare/Safety-II to quality improvement. She convenes the Human Factors short course for healthcare professionals and participates in projects such as the NHMRC Partnership Project Grant for improving perioperative care for older people and the Meaningful and Purpose-Centred Care program for residential aged care. Key publications include 'Driver distraction: the effects of concurrent in-vehicle tasks, road environment complexity and age on driving performance' (2006), 'Defining the boundaries and operational concepts of resilience in the resilience in healthcare research program' (2020), 'Can incident reporting improve safety? Healthcare practitioners' views of the effectiveness of incident reporting' (2013), 'One size fits all? Mixed methods evaluation of the impact of 100% single-room accommodation on staff and patient experience, safety and costs' (2016), 'Co-Designing a Palliative Dementia Care Framework to Support Holistic Assessment and Decision Making: The EMBED-Care Framework' (2024), and 'Decoding healthcare teamwork: a typology of hospital teams' (2024). She serves as Associate Editor for Patient Safety in Frontiers in Health Services.