The aim of this book is to show how a cultural approach can contribute to the assessment, description and improvement of safety conditions in organizations. The relationship between organizational culture and safety, epitomized through the concept of 'safety culture', has undoubtedly become one of the hottest topics of both safety research and practical efforts to improve safety. By combining a general framework and five research projects, the author explores and further develops the theoretical, methodological and practical basis of the study of safety culture. What are the theoretical foundations of a cultural approach to safety? How can the relationship between organizational culture and safety be empirically investigated? What are the links between organizational culture and safety in actual organizations? How can a cultural approach contribute to the improvement of safety? These are the key questions the book seeks to answer with a unified and in-depth account of the concept of safety culture.

The aim of this book is to show how a cultural approach can contribute to the assessment, description and improvement of safety conditions in organizations. The relationship between organizational culture and safety, epitomized through the concept of 'safety culture', has undoubtedly become one of the hottest topics of both safety research and practical efforts to improve safety. By combining a general framework and five research projects, the author explores and further develops the theoretical, methodological and practical basis of the study of safety culture. What are the theoretical foundations of a cultural approach to safety? How can the relationship between organizational culture and safety be empirically investigated? What are the links between organizational culture and safety in actual organizations? How can a cultural approach contribute to the improvement of safety? These are the key questions the book seeks to answer with a unified and in-depth account of the concept of safety culture.

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.

The objective of this book is to help at-risk organizations to decipher the “safety cloud”, and to position themselves in terms of operational decisions and improvement strategies in safety, considering the path already travelled, their context, objectives and constraints. What link can be established between safety culture and safety models in order to increase safety within companies carrying out dangerous activities? First, while the term “safety culture” is widely shared among the academic and industrial world, it leads to various interpretations and therefore different positioning when it comes to assess, improve or change it. Many safety theories, concepts, and models coexist today, being more or less appealing and/or directly useful to the industry. How, and based on which criteria, to choose from the available options? These are some of the questions addressed in this book, which benefits from the expertise of its worldwide famous authors in several industrial sectors.

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.

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.

Food safety awareness is at an all time high, new and emerging threats to the food supply are being recognized, and consumers are eating more and more meals prepared outside of the home. Accordingly, retail and foodservice establishments, as well as food producers at all levels of the food production chain, have a growing responsibility to ensure that proper food safety and sanitation practices are followed, thereby, safeguarding the health of their guests and customers. Achieving food safety success in this changing environment requires going beyond traditional training, testing, and inspectional approaches to managing risks. It requires a better understanding of organizational culture and the human dimensions of food safety. To improve the food safety performance of a retail or foodservice establishment, an organization with thousands of employees, or a local community, you must change the way people do things. You must change their behavior. In fact, simply put, food safety equals behavior. When viewed from these lenses, one of the most common contributing causes of food borne disease is unsafe behavior (such as improper hand washing, cross-contamination, or undercooking food). Thus, to improve food safety, we need to better integrate food science with behavioral science and use a systems-based approach to managing food safety risk. The importance of organizational culture, human behavior, and systems thinking is well documented in the occupational safety and health fields. However, significant contributions to the scientific literature on these topics are noticeably absent in the field of food safety.

This book provides traffic safety researchers and practitioners with an international and multi-disciplinary compendium of theoretical and methodological concepts relevant to the research and application of Traffic Safety Culture aiming towards a vision of zero traffic fatalities.

Major accidents are rare events due to the many barriers, safeguards and defences developed by modern technologies. But they continue to happen with saddening regularity and their human and financial consequences are all too often unacceptably catastrophic. One of the greatest challenges we face is to develop more effective ways of both understanding and limiting their occurrence. This lucid book presents a set of common principles to further our knowledge of the causes of major accidents in a wide variety of high-technology systems. It also describes tools and techniques for managing the risks of such organizational accidents that go beyond those currently available to system managers and safety professionals. James Reason deals comprehensively with the prevention of major accidents arising from human and organizational causes. He argues that the same general principles and management techniques are appropriate for many different domains. These include banks and insurance companies just as much as nuclear power plants, oil exploration and production companies, chemical process installations and air, sea and rail transport. Its unique combination of principles and practicalities make this seminal book essential reading for all whose daily business is to manage, audit and regulate hazardous technologies of all kinds. It is relevant to those concerned with understanding and controlling human and organizational factors and will also interest academic readers and those working in industrial and government agencies.

This book offers a new, practical approach to healthcare reform. Departing from the priorities applied in traditional approaches, it instead assesses – both theoretically and practically – the successful lessons learned in other safety-critical industries, and applies them to healthcare settings. The authors focus on the importance of human factors and performance measures to establish proactive, systematic methods for healthcare system design. This approach helps to identify potential hazards before accidents occur, enhancing patient safety. In addition, the book details the new approach on the basis of real-world applications in the NHS and insights from NHS staff. Case studies and results are presented, demonstrating the significant improvements that can be achieved in risk reduction and safety culture. Lastly, the book outlines what steps healthcare organisations need to take in order to successfully adopt this new approach. The approach and experiential learning is brought together through the development of a new holistic patient safety education syllabus.