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 book is a guide to the development of an effective field sampling program as well as to Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and technical information for many of the most effective remedial investigation methods. The book focuses on intrusive investigation techniques, but non-intrusive techniques such as aerial photography, surface geophysics, and surface radiological surveying are also addressed. SOPs have been provided for those sampling techniques that do not require specialized academic training, such as soil, sediment, surface water, groundwater, and drum sampling. For more specialized investigative techniques, such as underground drainage surveying and some types of soil-gas surveying, information is provided to help you understand how the technique works and under what conditions it can be used most effectively. The book also addresses: equipment decontamination; sample preparation, documentation, and shipment; health and safety; and management of investigation-derived waste. Emphasis is placed on those methods and procedures that have both proved themselves to be effective and are acknowledged by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as reputable techniques.

Demonstrating safety for the application of ever more complex technologies is a formidable task. System engineers often do not have the appropriate training, are unfamiliar with the range of safety approaches, tools and techniques, and their managers do not know when and how these may be applied and appropriately resourced. This book provides a basic skill set for designers, safety practitioners, and their managers by exploring the relationship between safety, legal liability and regulatory requirements. Different approaches to measuring safety are discussed, along with the appropriate safety criteria used in judging acceptability. A wealth of ideas, examples, concepts, tools and approaches from diverse sources and industries are used to bring the theory of safety concisely together in a practical and comprehensive reference. --

New perspectives on how to successfully drive changes in companies’ process safety management systems Simply learning from process safety incidents has proven to be insufficient to drive performance improvements. To truly change, organizations must seek out & embed learnings in their programs & systems. This book picks up from previous CCPS books, Incidents That Define Process Safety and Investigating Process Safety Incidents. This important book: Offers guidelines for improving process safety performance by embedding the lessons learned from publicly available investigations Recommends a continuous improvement learning model focused on organizational learning Provides examples for using the model’s techniques to drive continuous improvements Contains an index of more than 400 investigated incidents and introduces the concept of Drilldown to help find lessons that might not have been mentioned before. Written for safety professionals and process safety consultants, Driving Continuous Process Safety Improvement from Investigated Incidents is a hands-on guide for adopting a model for successfully driving the learnings from process safety incident investigations.