Operating Without a Safety Net

Operating in a contemporary safety net.

Surgeons share their challenges and dilemmas in making ethical decisions in these twelve personal stories. The three commentary articles draw out the lessons the stories address. The commentators come from diverse backgrounds including sociology, bioethics, nursing, and surgery.

Living without a safety net in an Intelligent Environment

Computing systems comprise a surreptitious and intrinsic part of our daily life activities. Applications that support humans in daily life facilitate the development of the so-called Intelligent Environments. Like any technology Intelligent Environments can fail. This paper examines potential negative consequences of such systems if they are too naively or optimistically developed and used. The...

A safety net for diabetics.

www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 343 7 MARCH 2014 COVER Precession image reconstructed from x-ray diffraction data collected from a benzene single crystal. For the past 100 years, x-ray crystallography has been a key tool for determining the structures of ever more complex chemical and biochemical systems. See the special section beginning on page 1091 and at www.sciencemag.org/special/crystallog...

Building a better safety net

Improving operating room safety

Despite the introduction of the Universal Protocol, patient safety in surgery remains a daily challenge in the operating room. This present study describes one community health system's efforts to improve operating room safety through human factors training and ultimately the development of a surgical checklist. Using a combination of formal training, local studies documenting operating room sa...