Barriers and Facilitators in Implementing the Safety Climate Thermometer: A New Tool for Surgical Teams.

This paper examines the human and safety culture factors of the seemingly intractable problem of foreign object retention in surgery. It reports the findings of the FOR-RaM research project, which sought to discover challenges to Foreign Object Management across surgical and maternity settings in Irish hospitals and to recommend changes to address these challenges. This was a co-design partnership with a wide range of stakeholders in the study hospital; its mixed methods included Semi-structured interviews, Observations in surgical settings and Action Learning Sets. The results highlight a number of safety culture and human factors considerations which may facilitate or hinder Foreign Object Management, such as (individual and team) Goals, the Processes required for successful Foreign Object Management, Culture, Teamwork, Information Management and Training.

Understanding the safety climate of the contractor‟s organization with regard to safety and risk in the workplace will provide an overview of the current safety culture of that organization. The perceptions and attitudes of the workforce are the important factors in assessing the safety needs in order to facilitate workplace safety improvement. Safety performance may fail if the organization does not take into account these current attitudes and perceptions. The aim of this study is to examine the factors and assessment of safety climate in the contractors‟ organizations. This study is carried out through questionnaire survey to gauge employee attitudes and perceptions using several attitudes dimensions. The full employee attitude survey questionnaire was divided into two sections which consists of 49 statements. The responses of this study were quite encouraging with 60% participants responded. However, only 38 valid sets of questionnaires were subjected to analysis. The findings indicated that there were many factors and indicators of safety climate that had been found from the literature review. In fact, the numbers of factors required in the safety climate measurements, or which factors were the most effective were always subjected to argument. From the review of safety climate factors, the most frequently measured dimensions were related to management, safety systems and risk, followed by work pressure, competence and rules or procedures. On the assessment of the contractors‟ safety climate, the total average scores for all dimensions were in levels of satisfaction with a score ranging from 6.48 to 8.04. Also, all the safety climate dimensions showed scores in the satisfactory values with a score above six (6) for the system interfaces of the contractor organizations using the safety climate matrix. Hence, the contractor‟s organizations surveyed had the positive safety climate toward safety in their workplace.

Designing and developing safe systems has been a persistent challenge in health care, and in surgical settings in particular. In efforts to promote safety, safety culture, i.e., shared values regarding safety management, is considered a key driver of high-quality, safe healthcare delivery. However, changing organizational culture so that it emphasizes and promotes safety is often an elusive goal. The Safe Surgery Checklist is an innovative tool for improving safety culture and surgical care safety, but evidence about Safe Surgery Checklist effectiveness is mixed. We examined the relationship between changes in management practices and changes in perceived safety culture during implementation of safe surgery checklists. Using a pre-posttest design and survey methods, we evaluated Safe Surgery Checklist implementation in a national sample of 42 general acute care hospitals in a leading hospital network. We measured perceived management practices among managers (n = 99) using the World Management Survey. We measured perceived preoperative safety and safety culture among clinical operating room personnel (N = 2,380 (2016); N = 1,433 (2017)) using the Safe Surgical Practice Survey. We collected data in two consecutive years. Multivariable linear regression analysis demonstrated a significant relationship between changes in management practices and overall safety culture and perceived teamwork following Safe Surgery Checklist implementation.

Safety climate and health complaints in the Norwegian aquaculture industry

A deficient safety culture has been implicated in industrial accidents. More recently, patient safety problems in hospital care have revealed a weak safety culture as a causal factor. As in the other industrial sectors, the level of safety for hospital patients and staff is likely to be determined largely by the hospital's safety culture. Measuring safety culture is a risk management technique widely used in high-reliability industries to identify safety problems before they become realised as accidents and near misses. The most common approach to measuring safety culture is to conduct a safety climate survey of the workforce. A safety climate survey typically assesses the workforce's attitudes and perceptions about work pressure, communication, reporting and safety systems, and supervision and management commitment to safety. Thus, safety climate surveys provide a range of leading indicators about an organisation's underlying safety culture, which need to be understood when designing and implementing safety interventions such as critical incident reporting systems. This paper reviews the construct validity of 13 instruments that have been used to assess safety climate in healthcare. An explanatory model linking safety climate and safety behaviours is proposed in order to develop more valid measures of safety climate in healthcare.

Recently, the solar cell is the most important inventions for solar energy applications. The solar cell was regarded as renewable energy. At present, silicon material prices rises gradually. Some people commence to find others materials as absorption layer of solar cells. For example, CIGS is a direct band gap semiconductor material with band gap ranging from 1.02 ~ 1.68 eV. It possesses higher absorption coefficient. Therefore, CIGS is regarded as the most potential absorption layer for high efficiency solar cells. In this study, the CIGS-based thin film solar cell grew by reactive magnetron sputtering system. The structure of the CIGS-based thin film solar cells is Al / Ti / ZnO / GaP / CIGS / Mo / Glass. The research discussed three parts. First, Scanning electron microscope equipped and X-ray diffraction were employed to analyze surface morphology and crystal qualities on CIGS film and bi-layer Mo film. Hall measurement was employed to analyze electrical of CIGS film and bi-layer Molybdenum film. Second, the effect of the GaP buffer layer instead of traditional CdS buffer layer on device performance. Third, the effect of ZnO thin film prepared by Ultrasonic spray pyrolsis on device performance. The bi-layer structure of Molybdenum back contact was deposited under higher working pressure and lower working pressure respectively. The former layer deposited at higher working pressure had good adhesion, and the latter one deposited at lower working pressure had low resistivity. The resistivity of bi-layer Mo electrode is 2.43x10-4Ω-cm. Furthermore, the I-V measurement analysis shows that Mo and CIGS have a good ohmic contact. In the XRD pattern, the diffraction peaks locate at 37.5o, 43.54o. The resistivity of CIGS absorption layer is 1.5 x 10-2Ω-cm at annealing temperature of 400℃. In the XRD pattern, it can be observed that annealing at high temperature can effectively increase the chalcopyrite crystal quality and grain size of CIGS films. The diffraction peaks of the chalcopyrite locate at 26.7o(112), 44.38o(204/220) and 52.54o(116/312). Finally, The fabricated cell of 0.09 cm2 active area shows an efficiency of 0.034 % with Voc = 170mV, Jsc = 0.556mA/cm2, FF = 0.36 under 100 mW/cm2 AM 1.5 illumination at 25℃.

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study is to examine the moderating role of state work pressure (conceived as a hindrance demand) on the relationships between situational emotional demands (conceived as a challenge demand) and tension, emotional exhaustion and work engagement within nursing while considering job resources as covariates. Ninety-seven nurses from two German hospitals provided 1026 measurements. Multilevel analyses indicated a significant Work Pressure × Emotional Demands interaction for emotional exhaustion, with high situational work pressure exacerbating the positive association between state emotional demands and emotional exhaustion. Furthermore, work pressure moderated the relationship between emotional demands and vigour: state emotional demands related negatively to vigour only when work pressure was higher than usual, while the relationship was non-significant when work pressure was lower than usual. For dedication, similar results were obtained: state emotional demands were negatively associated with dedication only when combined with high situational work pressure; with low situational work pressure, state emotional demands did not relate to dedication. Contributing to the job demands-resources literature, this study shows that there are stress-exacerbating and stress-buffering interactions between different job demands from a within-subject perspective. However, we did not find positive relationships between challenge demands and work engagement, even in the case of low situational hindrances, indicating that there are conditions for the functioning of job demands as a challenge beyond hindrances.

Amorphous In-Ga-Zn-O (a-IGZO) thin film transistors, because of their relatively low mobility, have limits in attempts to fulfill high-end specifications for display backplanes. In-Zn-O (IZO) is a promising semiconductor material for high mobility device applications with excellent transparency to visible light region and low temperature process capability. In this paper, the effects of working pressure on the physical and electrical properties of IZO films and thin film transistors are investigated. The working pressure is modulated from 2 mTorr to 5 mTorr, whereas the other process conditions are fixed. As the working pressure increases, the extracted optical band gap of IZO films gradually decreases. Absorption coefficient spectra indicate that subgap states increase at high working pressure. Furthermore, IZO film fabricated at low working pressure shows smoother surface morphology. As a result, IZO thin film transistors with optimum conditions exhibit excellent switching characteristics with high mobility (≥ 30cm2/Vs) and large on/off ratio.

Synthesis and characterization of DC magnetron sputtered ZnO thin films under high working pressures

An investigation of professional drivers: Organizational safety climate, driver behaviours and performance

IntroductionPatient safety is one of the key aspects of healthcare quality and a serious global public health concern. Patient safety culture is a part of the patient safety concept. In Slovenia, primary care is easily accessible, and for medical care, it serves as a gatekeeper to hospital care. For several years, the quality and safety at the primary healthcare level have been the focus of several studies. The present study aimed to assess patient safety culture among all employees of the Community Health Centre Ljubljana.MethodsWe conducted a cross-sectional study in 2017 using the Slovene version of “Medical Office Survey on Patient Safety Culture” from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Mean percent positive scores on all items in each composite were calculated according to a user guide.ResultsThe final sample contained 1021 participants (67.8% response rate), of which 909 (89.0%) were women. The mean age of the sample was 43.0±11.0 years. The dimensions most highly rated by the respondents were: teamwork and patient care tracking/follow-up. The lowest scores came from leadership support for patients’ safety and work pressure and pace.ConclusionPatient safety culture in the Community Health Centre Ljubljana is high, but there are certain areas of patient safety that need to be evaluated further and improved. Our study revealed differences between professions, indicating that a customized approach per profession group might contribute to the successful implementation of safety strategies. Patient safety culture should be studied at national levels.

Objectives The main objective of this study was to determine the perspective of the pharmacy staff on patient safety culture and to identify areas of strength and weakness in safety culture. Materials and Methods The study was a cross-sectional survey conducted among pharmacy staff who were directly involved with the provision of pharmaceutical services to patients in a tertiary healthcare facility in South-West, Nigeria. Data were collected using the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Questionnaire. A purposive sampling technique was used to randomly administer the questionnaire to 82 pharmacy personnel who had direct professional interactions with patients. Analysis of data was done using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences version 25. Results More than 80% of respondents were professionals (pharmacists/Internees) who were directly involved in providing pharmaceutical services in the department; 50% of respondents had worked in the pharmacy department from 1 year to <12 years and 56.1% worked more than 40 h per week. Overall, positive responses were satisfactory for teamwork (66.7%), overall perception of patient safety (61.0%), patient counseling (81%), and organizational learning (56.1%) but poor for staffing, work pressure and pace (26.8%), and communication about prescription across shifts (40.7%). Patient safety in this pharmacy received an overall rating of 62.2%. Conclusion There is a need for urgent attention of the management of the hospital to be drawn toward the need for re-evaluation of current safety culture composites and amend systems where necessary to reduce risks and improve pharmacy patient safety.

Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings includes abstracts of all papers and symposia presented at the annual conference, plus 6-page abridged versions of the “Best Papers” accepted for inclusion in the program (approximately 10%). Papers published in the Proceedings are abridged because presenting papers at their full length could preclude subsequent journal publication. Please contact the author(s) directly for the full papers. ArticlesLEARNING TO AVOID LEARNING: THE PARADOXES OF RESIDENCY TRAINING AROUND MEDICAL ERRORS.TIMOTHY J. HOFFTIMOTHY J. HOFFPublished Online:13 Dec 2017https://doi.org/10.5465/ambpp.2004.13857704AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsDownload CitationsAdd to favoritesTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail AbstractErrors and safety are important issues in organizations. Within the health care industry, current debate around them stresses the need to create "learning cultures" to promote systems-thinking, error reporting, and develop more physician leaders in patient safety. Sociologically, medical residency is seen as the primary training and socialization point for physicians as professionals. Thus, the present study explores the reality and potential of the everyday medical residency work environment to function as a learning culture around mistakes and failure. Extended observations and interviews of attending and resident physicians working in surgical and medical intensive care unit settings revealed over 20 medical errors within each setting, most of which had few learning-oriented attitudes and behaviors associated with them. The study finds inherent paradoxes in the nature of how residents are trained presently that negatively affect the ability of the medical profession and hospitals to foster learning environments with respect medical errors. Through a competing value lens, the paradoxes are viewed as resulting from the need for residency programs to pursue a diverse array of effectiveness goals in order to turn residents into independently practicing physicians, above and beyond the singular focus on minimizing error. The findings highlight the difficulty of attempting to create and maintain "cultures of safety" in organizations which must respond to safety imperatives. They also point to a view of organizational safety management that involves developing reliable ways of simultaneously maintaining divergent cultural practices that allow pursuit of the widest range of effectiveness goals possible.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Vol. 2004, No. 1 Permissions Metrics in the past 12 months History Published online 13 December 2017 Published in print 1 August 2004 InformationCopyright of Academy of Management Journal is the property of Academy of Management and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder’s express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.KeywordsMEDICAL errorsMEDICINE -- PracticeRESIDENTS (Medicine)MEDICAL careSAFETYORGANIZATIONAL learningPHYSICIAN & patientWORK environmentHOSPITALS -- ManagementLEARNINGDownload PDF

The human and organizational factors affecting safety were examined on 10 offshore installations using the Offshore Safety Questionnaire. The questionnaire contained scales measuring work pressure and work clarity, job communication, safety behaviour, risk perception, satisfaction with safety measures and safety attitudes. A total of 722 UK offshore workers (33% response rate) from a range of occupations completed and returned the questionnaire. The ‘safety climates’ on the various installations were characterized by most respondents feeling ‘safe’ with respect to a range of offshore hazards and expressing ‘satisfaction’ with safety measures. Respondents reported little risk-taking behaviour and felt positive about levels of work clarity and job communication. There was a wider diversity of opinions on the safety attitudes scale, indicating a lack of a positive, concerted ‘safety culture’ and more evidence for a range offragmented ‘safety subcultures’, which varied mainly as a function of seniority, occupation, age, shift worked and prior accident involvement. It is suggested that the interaction between these differing subcultures partly determines the prevailing ‘safety climate’ on any given installation. The UK oil and gas industry is now trying to improve its safety culture through the ‘Stepchange’ initiative, which hias set itself three main targets for the year 2000 : a 50 YO improvement in the industry's safety performance; safety performance contracts demonstrating leadership's personal concern for safety as an equal to business performance and encouraging industry members to work together to improve sharing of safety information and good practice. It is suggested that the existence of a strong, cohesive culture with respect to safety is not necessarily beneficial, possibly leading to ‘dry rot’ and complacency. A healthy culture may be represented by a range of assumptions, values, norms and expectations as reflected in employees' differing experiences of safety climate.

Safety culture among bus drivers in Norway and Greece