Culture Of Safety

Building on the revolutionary Institute of Medicine reports To Err is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm, Keeping Patients Safe lays out guidelines for improving patient safety by changing nurses' working conditions and demands. Licensed nurses and unlicensed nursing assistants are critical participants in our national effort to protect patients from health care errors. The nature of the activities nurses typically perform â€" monitoring patients, educating home caretakers, performing treatments, and rescuing patients who are in crisis â€" provides an indispensable resource in detecting and remedying error-producing defects in the U.S. health care system. During the past two decades, substantial changes have been made in the organization and delivery of health care â€" and consequently in the job description and work environment of nurses. As patients are increasingly cared for as outpatients, nurses in hospitals and nursing homes deal with greater severity of illness. Problems in management practices, employee deployment, work and workspace design, and the basic safety culture of health care organizations place patients at further risk. This newest edition in the groundbreaking Institute of Medicine Quality Chasm series discusses the key aspects of the work environment for nurses and reviews the potential improvements in working conditions that are likely to have an impact on patient safety.

Current safety and risk management guidelines necessitate that organizations develop and formally manage their understanding and knowledge of the standards and protocols of risk management. The impact of communication and human performance on the identification and control of hazards and associated risk must be addressed in a structured manner. This core reference provides a complete guide to creating a comprehensive and effective safety culture. Safety Culture is a reference for safety and risk professionals and a training text for corporate-based learners and students at university level. The book will keep safety and risk management professionals up-to-date and will provide the tools needed to develop consistent and effective organizational safety protocols. How to develop a foundation to improve the perception of safety, analyze the organizational culture and its impact on the safety management system, and review the importance of developing a influential network Provides a format for establishing goals and objectives, discusses the impact of leadership on the safety management system and the roles and responsibilities needed as well as methods to gain employee participation Tools to enhance the safety management system, the education and training of employees, how to assess the current safety management system, and the process of curation is introduced

Provides a clear road map to instilling a culture of safety excellence in any organization Did you know that accidental injury is among the top ten leading causes of death in every age group? With this book as your guide, you'll learn how to help your organization develop, implement, and sustain Safety Culture Excellence, vital for the protection of and improvement in the quality of life for everyone who works there. STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence is based on the authors' firsthand experience working with international organizations in every major industry that have successfully developed and implemented ongoing cultures of safety excellence. Whether your organization is a small regional firm or a large multinational corporation, you'll find that the STEPS process enables you to instill Safety Culture Excellence within your organization. STEPS (Strategic Targets for Excellent Performance in Safety) demystifies the process of developing Safety Culture Excellence by breaking it down into small logical, internally led tasks. You'll be guided through a sequence of STEPS that makes it possible to: Create a culture of excellence that is reinforced and empowered at every level Develop the capability within the culture to identify, prioritize, and solve safety problems and challenges Maintain and continuously improve the performance of your organization's safety culture Although this book is dedicated to safety, the tested and proven STEPS process can be used to promote excellence in any aspect of organizational performance. By optimizing the safety culture in your organization, you will give the people you work with the skills and knowledge to not only minimize the risk of an on-the-job accident, but also to lead safe, healthy lives outside of work.

How safe are hospitals? Why do some hospitals have higher rates of accident and errors involving patients? How can we accurately measure and assess staff attitudes towards safety? How can hospitals and other healthcare environments improve their safety culture and minimize harm to patients? These and other questions have been the focus of research within the area of Patient Safety Culture (PSC) in the last decade. More and more hospitals and healthcare managers are trying to understand the nature of the culture within their organisations and implement strategies for improving patient safety. The main purpose of this book is to provide researchers, healthcare managers and human factors practitioners with details of the latest developments within the theory and application of PSC within healthcare. It brings together contributions from the most prominent researchers and practitioners in the field of PSC and covers the background to work on safety culture (e.g. measuring safety culture in industries such as aviation and the nuclear industry), the dominant theories and concepts within PSC, examples of PSC tools, methods of assessment and their application, and details of the most prominent challenges for the future in the area. Patient Safety Culture: Theory, Methods and Application is essential reading for all of the professional groups involved in patient safety and healthcare quality improvement, filling an important gap in the current market.

This unique and engaging open access title provides a compelling and ground-breaking account of the patient safety movement in the United States, told from the perspective of one of its most prominent leaders, and arguably the movement’s founder, Lucian L. Leape, MD. Covering the growth of the field from the late 1980s to 2015, Dr. Leape details the developments, actors, organizations, research, and policy-making activities that marked the evolution and major advances of patient safety in this time span. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, this book not only comprehensively details how and why human and systems errors too often occur in the process of providing health care, it also promotes an in-depth understanding of the principles and practices of patient safety, including how they were influenced by today’s modern safety sciences and systems theory and design. Indeed, the book emphasizes how the growing awareness of systems-design thinking and the self-education and commitment to improving patient safety, by not only Dr. Leape but a wide range of other clinicians and health executives from both the private and public sectors, all converged to drive forward the patient safety movement in the US. Making Healthcare Safe is divided into four parts: I. In the Beginning describes the research and theory that defined patient safety and the early initiatives to enhance it. II. Institutional Responses tells the stories of the efforts of the major organizations that began to apply the new concepts and make patient safety a reality. Most of these stories have not been previously told, so this account becomes their histories as well. III. Getting to Work provides in-depth analyses of four key issues that cut across disciplinary lines impacting patient safety which required special attention. IV. Creating a Culture of Safety looks to the future, marshalling the best thinking about what it will take to achieve the safe care we all deserve. Captivatingly written with an “insider’s” tone and a major contribution to the clinical literature, this title will be of immense value to health care professionals, to students in a range of academic disciplines, to medical trainees, to health administrators, to policymakers and even to lay readers with an interest in patient safety and in the critical quest to create safe care.

This volume, developed by the Observatory together with OECD, provides an overall conceptual framework for understanding and applying strategies aimed at improving quality of care. Crucially, it summarizes available evidence on different quality strategies and provides recommendations for their implementation. This book is intended to help policy-makers to understand concepts of quality and to support them to evaluate single strategies and combinations of strategies.

Despite the fact that workplaces have implemented and followed new safety innovations and approaches, the majority of them have seen little, if any, significant progress in the reduction of accidental deaths and injuries. Changing the Workplace Safety Culture demonstrates that changing the way an organization views and practices safety will impact the behavior of all employees including executive and line managers. It delineates how safety culture change can be implemented and defines the roles of everyone in the safety culture, including management, employees, and unions and their members. Rather than focus on behavior-based safety measures, this book provides step-by-step procedures on how to establish a long-lasting integrated safety management system in any organization. It explores how to change the safety personality of an organization. The author covers the management principles and functions that need to be applied to bring about safety culture change and includes many real-life examples. He goes on to explain the activities needed to implement safety change and the benefits of getting others involved in the safety management system. The only way to ensure that accidents and their consequences are tackled at the source is to identify and eliminate the workplace risks before, rather than after, the event. To be truly effective, safety activities must be integrated into the day-to-day business and become a way of life for management and employees of the organization. This book provides a blueprint for creating an active safety culture that prevents accidents before they occur and becomes the key component in ongoing safety success.

An essential guide that offers an understanding of and the practices needed to assess and strengthen process safety culture Essential Practices for Developing, Strengthening and Implementing Process Safety Culture presents a much-needed guide for understanding an organization's working culture and contains information on why a good culture is essential for safe, cost-effective, and high-quality operations. The text defines process safety culture and offers information on a safety culture’s history, organizational impact and benefits, and the role that leadership plays at all levels of an organization. In addition, the book outlines the core principles needed to assess and strengthen process safety culture such as: maintain a sense of vulnerability; combat normalization of deviance; establish an imperative for safety; perform valid, timely, hazard and risk assessments; ensure open and frank communications; learn and advance the culture. This important guide also reviews leadership standards within the organizational structure, warning signs of cultural degradation and remedies, as well as the importance of using diverse methods over time to assess culture. This vital resource: Provides an overview for understanding an organization's working culture Offers guidance on why a good culture is essential for safe, cost-effective, and high quality operations Includes down-to-earth advice for recognizing, assessing, strengthening and sustaining a good process safety culture Contains illustrative examples and cases studies, and references to literature, codes, and standards Written for corporate, business and line managers, engineers, and process safety professionals interested in excellent performance for their organization, Essential Practices for Developing, Strengthening and Implementing Process Safety Culture is the go-to reference for implementing and keeping in place a culture of safety.

Safety. You, like all humans, have a hardwired biological need for it. This is why you're reading the description of this book. Your body and brain were drawn to the word-safety. Unfortunately, most of us don't feel a sense of safety at work, and when we don't feel safe our operating IQ drops by half. Yes, half. Without safety, we literally can't think, collaborate or innovate. Yet in times of constant change and increasing complexity, building a culture of safety is an imperative for organizational survival. In these pages, you will learn how to build a culture of safety in your organization. It starts with understanding the three types of safety, then shifting your leadership from fear to safety, and finally implementing specific practices to build safety in your team and organization. With the help of neuroscience, immediately applicable exercises, and step-by-step practices, all leaders will be able to begin building a culture of safety.

Recent serious and sometimes fatal accidents in chemical research laboratories at United States universities have driven government agencies, professional societies, industries, and universities themselves to examine the culture of safety in research laboratories. These incidents have triggered a broader discussion of how serious incidents can be prevented in the future and how best to train researchers and emergency personnel to respond appropriately when incidents do occur. As the priority placed on safety increases, many institutions have expressed a desire to go beyond simple compliance with regulations to work toward fostering a strong, positive safety culture: affirming a constant commitment to safety throughout their institutions, while integrating safety as an essential element in the daily work of laboratory researchers. Safe Science takes on this challenge. This report examines the culture of safety in research institutions and makes recommendations for university leadership, laboratory researchers, and environmental health and safety professionals to support safety as a core value of their institutions. The report discusses ways to fulfill that commitment through prioritizing funding for safety equipment and training, as well as making safety an ongoing operational priority. A strong, positive safety culture arises not because of a set of rules but because of a constant commitment to safety throughout an organization. Such a culture supports the free exchange of safety information, emphasizes learning and improvement, and assigns greater importance to solving problems than to placing blame. High importance is assigned to safety at all times, not just when it is convenient or does not threaten personal or institutional productivity goals. Safe Science will be a guide to make the changes needed at all levels to protect students, researchers, and staff.