Ergonomics is a human-centered discipline. This is particularly true for healthcare systems and patient safety where the human’s well-being will undergo critical impacts if solutions are not properly designed and practiced. Effective handling of these concerns involves knowledge from healthcare work (e.g., shift work, patient handling, and medical teamwork), to safety research (resilience, medical process control, intensive care, surgery/anesthesiology, and patient involvement), and to more general issues such as community participation in public affairs. To pursue the mission, the Healthcare System Ergonomics and Patient Safety (HEPS) commenced its first conference in Florence, Italy in 2005. Following the founding success, HEPS became an IEA-sponsored event and the series subsequently took place in Strasbourg, France in 2008, and in Oviedo, Spain in 2011. The three remarkable conferences have forged a world-class platform for researchers and practitioners from around the globe to exchange and disseminate the knowledge in HEPS. This volume contains the selected papers presented at the Fourth International conference on HEPS, held from June 23 to 26, 2014 in Taiwan. The Fourth HEPS, organized by the Ergonomics Society of Taiwan (EST) and endorsed by the International Ergonomics Association (IEA), aims to consolidate the knowledge bridged between ergonomics research and healthcare practices for the safety and welfare of patients. Researchers, professionals, and practitioners in ergonomics and healthcare around the world have shared their wisdom, experience, insights, and visions on past, current and future efforts in healthcare systems ergonomics and patient safety. The papers contributing to this book address the latest research, applications and practices in accordance with the theme of the conference, "Bridging Research and Good Practices towards Patients Welfare," and cover the following areas: "Aging and Healthcare System", "Healthcare, Mobil Application and Usability", "Safety, Hazards and MSDs", "Simulation, Modeling and Decision Making", "Environment and System Design", and "Human Factors and Product Design".

In recent years there has been a huge rise in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research in animal sciences which has accelerated improvements in animal welfare. Down to earth and practical, this book gives guidance on how cross-disciplinary research can advance animal welfare. With numerous examples and case studies, the text explains: · the different concepts regarding cross-disciplinary research · how to set up cross-disciplinary research projects · how to work in cross functional teams and models for effective team working · how different fields can impact animal welfare, including social sciences, neurosciences, genetics, behavioural ecology and technology. The aim of the book is to help researchers and graduate animal science students to understand how to advance animal welfare through the integration of disciplines.

How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice provides a broad overview of research on learners and learning and on teachers and teaching. It expands on the 1999 National Research Council publication How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, Expanded Edition that analyzed the science of learning in infants, educators, experts, and more. In How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice, the Committee on Learning Research and Educational Practice asks how the insights from research can be incorporated into classroom practice and suggests a research and development agenda that would inform and stimulate the required change. The committee identifies teachers, or classroom practitioners, as the key to change, while acknowledging that change at the classroom level is significantly impacted by overarching public policies. How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice highlights three key findings about how students gain and retain knowledge and discusses the implications of these findings for teaching and teacher preparation. The highlighted principles of learning are applicable to teacher education and professional development programs as well as to K-12 education. The research-based messages found in this book are clear and directly relevant to classroom practice. It is a useful guide for teachers, administrators, researchers, curriculum specialists, and educational policy makers.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Social isolation and loneliness are serious yet underappreciated public health risks that affect a significant portion of the older adult population. Approximately one-quarter of community-dwelling Americans aged 65 and older are considered to be socially isolated, and a significant proportion of adults in the United States report feeling lonely. People who are 50 years of age or older are more likely to experience many of the risk factors that can cause or exacerbate social isolation or loneliness, such as living alone, the loss of family or friends, chronic illness, and sensory impairments. Over a life course, social isolation and loneliness may be episodic or chronic, depending upon an individual's circumstances and perceptions. A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that social isolation presents a major risk for premature mortality, comparable to other risk factors such as high blood pressure, smoking, or obesity. As older adults are particularly high-volume and high-frequency users of the health care system, there is an opportunity for health care professionals to identify, prevent, and mitigate the adverse health impacts of social isolation and loneliness in older adults. Social Isolation and Loneliness in Older Adults summarizes the evidence base and explores how social isolation and loneliness affect health and quality of life in adults aged 50 and older, particularly among low income, underserved, and vulnerable populations. This report makes recommendations specifically for clinical settings of health care to identify those who suffer the resultant negative health impacts of social isolation and loneliness and target interventions to improve their social conditions. Social Isolation and Loneliness in Older Adults considers clinical tools and methodologies, better education and training for the health care workforce, and dissemination and implementation that will be important for translating research into practice, especially as the evidence base for effective interventions continues to flourish.

Patient-centered, high-quality health care relies on the well-being, health, and safety of health care clinicians. However, alarmingly high rates of clinician burnout in the United States are detrimental to the quality of care being provided, harmful to individuals in the workforce, and costly. It is important to take a systemic approach to address burnout that focuses on the structure, organization, and culture of health care. Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-Being builds upon two groundbreaking reports from the past twenty years, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System and Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century, which both called attention to the issues around patient safety and quality of care. This report explores the extent, consequences, and contributing factors of clinician burnout and provides a framework for a systems approach to clinician burnout and professional well-being, a research agenda to advance clinician well-being, and recommendations for the field.