The decade ahead will test the nation's nearly 4 million nurses in new and complex ways. Nurses live and work at the intersection of health, education, and communities. Nurses work in a wide array of settings and practice at a range of professional levels. They are often the first and most frequent line of contact with people of all backgrounds and experiences seeking care and they represent the largest of the health care professions. A nation cannot fully thrive until everyone - no matter who they are, where they live, or how much money they make - can live their healthiest possible life, and helping people live their healthiest life is and has always been the essential role of nurses. Nurses have a critical role to play in achieving the goal of health equity, but they need robust education, supportive work environments, and autonomy. Accordingly, at the request of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, on behalf of the National Academy of Medicine, an ad hoc committee under the auspices of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine conducted a study aimed at envisioning and charting a path forward for the nursing profession to help reduce inequities in people's ability to achieve their full health potential. The ultimate goal is the achievement of health equity in the United States built on strengthened nursing capacity and expertise. By leveraging these attributes, nursing will help to create and contribute comprehensively to equitable public health and health care systems that are designed to work for everyone. The Future of Nursing 2020-2030: Charting a Path to Achieve Health Equity explores how nurses can work to reduce health disparities and promote equity, while keeping costs at bay, utilizing technology, and maintaining patient and family-focused care into 2030. This work builds on the foundation set out by The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health (2011) report.

Human error is cited over and over as a cause of incidents and accidents. The result is a widespread perception of a 'human error problem', and solutions are thought to lie in changing the people or their role in the system. For example, we should reduce the human role with more automation, or regiment human behavior by stricter monitoring, rules or procedures. But in practice, things have proved not to be this simple. The label 'human error' is prejudicial and hides much more than it reveals about how a system functions or malfunctions. This book takes you behind the human error label. Divided into five parts, it begins by summarising the most significant research results. Part 2 explores how systems thinking has radically changed our understanding of how accidents occur. Part 3 explains the role of cognitive system factors - bringing knowledge to bear, changing mindset as situations and priorities change, and managing goal conflicts - in operating safely at the sharp end of systems. Part 4 studies how the clumsy use of computer technology can increase the potential for erroneous actions and assessments in many different fields of practice. And Part 5 tells how the hindsight bias always enters into attributions of error, so that what we label human error actually is the result of a social and psychological judgment process by stakeholders in the system in question to focus on only a facet of a set of interacting contributors. If you think you have a human error problem, recognize that the label itself is no explanation and no guide to countermeasures. The potential for constructive change, for progress on safety, lies behind the human error label.