Welcome to my website of personal archives. I'm a retired country general surgeon with a life-long interest in applying ergonomics to surgery Michael Patkin
Why: I created this website to make it easy for colleagues and friends to view my papers (published or not) and to download whatever you may be interested in, for the common good.
How: I have tried to make this website user-friendly for skimming or reading on-line e.g. black on pale yellow and short line-length, and for downloading. I welcome comments and suggestionall the cleverness or wisdom is no substitute for feedback from users about product design..
Navigating: Apart from this index page you are now reading, there are 3 main kinds of pages on this website:
1.
Lists
The left column has a site index
The middle column has a list of papers
The right column has information about how the paper came to be published and my updated comments on it.
2.
Papers
The middle column has the paper itself. For longer papers the left -hand column has an index of sections of the paper, each with a pointer to that section
3.
Power-point
These are files of recent presentations I have given. I have added comments so they make sense without me being physically with you and talking as if it were a lecture
Copyright of many of my writings is held by publishers. Most have given permission for republication here. Others disallow this, and in these cases I have inserted pre-prints or later versions of these papers. You can reference either the website or the official publisher's citation. You can contact the publisher to buy a copy of the article, or you can contact me directly for a legal reprint.
If you do use my material for non-commercial purposes, please acknowledge this in the usual way. If you intend to use the information here commercially please contact me first.
Double issue of the ANZ Journal of Surgery has 9 papers on Heuristics in Surgery [http://www3.interscience.
wiley.com/journal/
120118388/grouphome/home.html]
Recent - June 2008
Fundamental Skills for Surgery (http://www.mcgraw-hill.com.au/html/9780074713358.html)
(training manual for RACS) Chapter 8. Ergonomics in Surgery
[see preprint - to be added]
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The systems approach to surgery is a recurring theme in the contents of this site
Here you see three elements and two interfaces. The Operator Interface is Ergonomics, and the Tissue Interface is Bio-engineering.
There's more about ergonomics in papers on this site. From the start it is worth saying:
1. Ergonomics is the science of people at work.
2. Changing any part of a system, such as a system of work, has effects on other parts of the system
3. A system is a set of items, each of which may have structure, function, energy content, information content, and has links to other items.
4. What comes out of a system can not be predicted from knowing what items do on their own. The political metaphor for this is "It seemed like a good idea at the time".