Abstract The out-of-hospital setting is unique to health care and presents many challenges to providing safe, high-quality medical care in emergency situations. The challenges of the prehospital environment require thoughtful design of systems and processes of care. The unique challenges of ambulance safety may be met by analyzing systems and incorporating process improvements. The purposes o...

The collection of services and providers that making up the safety net system plays a crucial role in providing health care to the nearly 50 million uninsured adults and children nationwide (Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured 2011a). Passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) presents both opportunities and significant challenges for this system. The health ref...

The majority of industrial enzymes available at present is used in food industry. Safety regulations of food enzymes differ among countries, including fundamental aspects, whether a pre-market approval is needed and on the level of details, e.g. what particular information manufacturers have to provide in the course of safety evaluation. Occupational safety concerns focus on allergenic properti...

[Context and motivation] Safety evidence plays an important role in gaining confidence in the safe operation of a system in a given context. For a large system, it is necessary to provide information about thousands of artefacts that might be used as evidence and about the relationships among themselves and also with other safety assurance assets. [Question/problem] Past research has only addre...

BACKGROUND Home care is the most rapidly growing segment of the Canadian healthcare system. Overwhelmingly, research on patient safety has been conducted within institutional settings, resulting in a significant knowledge gap about safety in homecare. Given the dramatic increase in the amount, acuity and complexity of health care being provided in the home and community, it is essential to deve...

The article by Cheri Wilson, “Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality: The Case for Language Access”, highlights 
the challenges of providing Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (CLAS) to patients with 
Limited English Proficiency (LEP). As the US pursues high-value, high-performance healthcare, our ability 
to meet the needs of our most vulnerable will determine whether we succeed...

Use of contracts in component based development is a well-known approach in the development of complex systems. However there are challenges when using this approach when dealing with safety, and safety assurance, properties. Safety is a system property and because of that, it can be hard to define the contribution of components that have an impact on safety. Contract based approaches addressin...

In the design of a safe road transport system there is a need to better understand the safety challenges lying ahead. One way of doing that is to evaluate safety technology with retrospective analysis of crashes. However, by using retros- pective data there is the risk of adapting safety innovations to scenarios irrelevant in the future. Also, challenges arise as safety interventions do not act...