Change doesn't come without pain, but the suffering caused by medication errors is justifi ca-tion enough to embark on the type of sweeping institutional reforms called for by an Institute of Medicine panel, several experts said. Electronic prescribing, electronic health records, and computerized treatment protocols are indispensable tools for reducing medication errors, according to the IOM re...

INTRODUCTION This study compared the conspicuity of three types of first-responder safety garments (NFPA 1971-2007 turnout gear coats, and ANSI/ISEA 107 and 207 safety vests). METHOD Participants drove instrumented vehicles on a closed track during both daytime and nighttime, indicating when they could first detect pedestrians in a simulated emergency response scene. Pedestrians wore one of t...

Barb Farlow wishes she had asked more questions about her daughter Annie’s care. Born with the chromosome disorder Trisomy 13, Annie was only a few months old when she died in hospital of what her parents believe may have been a treatable respiratory condition. Months after Annie’s death, they learned that a doctor had placed a “do not resuscitate” order on her chart without their consent, and ...

We consider the reuse of knowledge in the analysis, design, and assurance of safety-critical appliances. We refer to this knowledge as safety patterns for whom a considerable amount of literature has been published. However, relationships across this literature seem relatively unexplored. Our first analysis indicates, e.g. scattered information about properties and combinations of such patterns...

Patient safety has become an important policy agenda in healthcare systems since publication of the 1999 report entitled "To Err Is Human." The paradigm has changed from blaming the individual for the error to identifying the weakness in the system that led to the adverse events. Anesthesia is one of the first healthcare specialties to adopt techniques and lessons from the aviation industry. Th...

Economic & Political Weekly EPW FEBRuary 13, 2010 vol xlv no 7 47 M V Ramana ([email protected]) is at the Program on Science and Global Security, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International A ffairs, Princeton University, Princeton, USA. Ashwin Kumar ( ashwink@ cmu.edu) is at the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, C arnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. safety First? Kai...

This work deals with the problem of navigation while avoiding detection by a mobile adversary, which is a novel variant of pursuit-evasion featuring adversarial modeling. In this problem, an evading agent is placed on a graph, where one or more nodes are defined as safehouses. The agent’s goal is to find a path from its current location to a safehouse, while minimizing the probability of meetin...