Background: Speaking up among healthcare professionals plays an essential role in improving patient safety and quality of care, yet it remains complex and multifaceted behaviour. Despite awareness of potential risks and adverse outcomes for patients, professionals often hesitate to voice concerns due to various influencing factors. This complexity has encouraged research into the determinants of speaking-up behaviour in hospital settings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Limited knowledge regarding the relative effectiveness of workplace accident prevention approaches creates barriers to informed decision-making by policy makers, public health practitioners, workplace, and worker advocates.
Objectives: The objective of this review was to assess the effectiveness of broad categories of safety interventions in preventing accidents at work. The review aims to compare effects of safety interventions to no intervention, usual activities, or alternative intervention, and if possible, to examine which constituent components of safety intervention programs contribute more strongly to preventing accidents at work in a given setting or context.
Although the concept of safety culture was coined in relation to major accidents like Chernobyl and Piper Alpha, it has been embraced by the safety community at large as a cause for unsafe practice. In this article, three approaches to safety culture are discussed in terms of their underlying concepts of culture and organizational culture. Culture is an intangible, fuzzy concept encompassing acquired assumptions that is shared among the members of a group and that provides meaning to their perceptions and actions and those of others.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper describes the development of a management model to control barriers devised to prevent major hazard scenarios. Additionally, an audit technique is explained that assesses the quality of such a management system. The final purpose of the audit technique is to quantify those aspects of the management system that have a direct impact on the reliability and effectiveness of the barriers and, hence, the probability of the scenarios involved.
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