This volume examines the nature of human error -- its causes and origins, its classifications, and the extent to which it is possible to predict and prevent errors and their impact. One of the first texts to deal with this topic in detail, it draws into a single cohesive account contributions from experts in a range of disciplines including psychology, philosophy, and engineering. Offering an insightful discussion of fundamental and necessary questions about the nature and source of human error, the book draws significant conclusions and identifies areas worthy of further exploration. This volume will be of interest to all who are concerned with the impact human error has on both the individual and society.

This text discusses the emerging trend in product development and research that focuses on the increasingly important relationship between computer systems and social systems. The text emphasizes the significance of building tools to help people work together and the need for the identification of key factors within an organization to create systems more beneficial to users. Also contained are reviews of current research and discussions of both established tools, such as electronic mail and computer conferencing, and those newly developed programs that emphasize "work group" productivity over individual productivity.

For novices and experienced health and safety professionals alike, the Respiratory Protection Handbook fills a critical gap in the respiratory protection literature. This extensive guide provides all the information you need to dramatically expand your understanding of the concepts and day-to-day operations of respiratory protection. It is a fully self-contained text that expertly accomplishes two goals: first, for the novice, it clearly explains how to establish and implement an effective respiratory protection program; and second, for the experienced professional, it provides in-depth knowledge that goes beyond basics. Respiratory Protection Handbook addresses the development of respiratory protection devices, the capabilities and limitations of specific respirators, the respirator certification system, how to select appropriate filters, how to predict the service life of sorbents, fit testing methods, assigned protection factors, and much more. Nowhere else will you find a single source on this topic containing so much information.

Andrew Furness and Martin Muckett give an introduction to all areas of fire safety management, including the legal framework, causes and prevention of fire and explosions, fire protection measures, fire risk assessment, and fire investigation. Fire safety is not treated as an isolated area but linked into an effective health and safety management system.
"Introduction to Fire Safety Management" has been developed for the NEBOSH Certificate in Fire Safety and Risk Management and is also suitable for other NVQ level 3 and 4 fire safety courses. The text is highly illustrated in full colour, easy to read and supported by checklists, report forms and record sheets. This practical approach makes the book a valuable reference for health and safety professionals, fire officers, facility managers, safety reps, managers, supervisors and HR personnel in companies, as well as fire safety engineers, architects, construction managers and emergency fire services personnel.
Andrew Furness CFIOSH, GIFireE, Dip2OSH, MIIRSM, MRSH, is Managing Director of Salvus Consulting Limited who specialise in Fire Safety. He was the chairman of the NEBOSH / IOSH working party that developed the NEBOSH Fire Safety and Risk Management certificate.
Martin Muckett MA, MBA, CMIOSH, MIFireE, Dip2OSH, former Principal Health and Safety Advisor to The Fire Service Inspectorate and Principal Fire Safety Officer, Martin is currently Salvus Consulting Limited's Senior Fire Safety Trainer / Consultant.
* Fully covers the syllabus for the NEBOSH Certificate in Fire Safety and Risk Management
* Student-friendly presentation in full colour packed with illustrations and photographs
* Includes a summary oflegislation relevant to fire safety, ideal as a reference for students as well as practitioners

20 murders every week. 18,000 assaults in the same time. All on the job. Sharp increases in workplace violence continue to take an unfortunate toll on American business-and its employees, families and communities. Preventative measures may be well-intentioned, but pose troubling conflicts in themselves, pitting each employee's privacy vs. overall worker protection. A full-self evaluation of your business and its personnel may be the key to safeguard against workplace violence. Thomas D. Schneid's Occupational Health Guide to Violence in the Workplace provides the important guidelines for that careful, all-encompassing examination. Most books on workplace violence focus on psychological profiles. In a change of pace, Schneid examines the issue from a safety/health professional's viewpoint, taking all angles, legal issues, and potential ramifications into account. Chapters focus on not only in-house efforts to prevent violent incidents, but also government and legal standards directly or indirectly related to worker's rights and corporate liability. Make every effort to prevent workplace violence from hitting home: start with advice from the Occupational Health Guide to Violence in the Workplace

Safety professionals communicate, directly and indirectly with a large number of employees and others on a daily basis. While not lawyers, they regularly deal with legal issues. A subset of their responsibilities includes how to discuss safety without crossing the discriminatory line. To do this, they need an understanding of discrimination laws. Discrimination Law Issues for the Safety Professional gives them exactly that. It provides general knowledge of the laws and regulations that offer protection to employees and individuals against discrimination in the workplace.

Created by safety expert Thomas Schneid, specifically for safety professionals, the book takes a proactive approach to identifying situations where potential discrimination against an employee or individual may occur, and supplies guidance on how to take immediate action to address the potential discriminatory situation. Schneid also identifies "red flag" situations where potential discrimination against an employee or individual may surface and safety professionals should proceed with caution. Once they can recognize these red flags, they can take immediate action to address the potential discriminatory situation.

Although many texts address discrimination in the workplace, very few, if any, educate individuals and employers on how to prevent" "acts and omissions in the workplace that can result in discrimination from a safety perspective. With the multitude of laws and regulations addressing the prohibition of discrimination in the workplace, often legal actions result from individuals and employers simply not being knowledgeable in the requirements of the law. Written in clear, plain language, not legalese or business speak, this book delineates the procedures that safety professionals need to know in the area of labor, employment, and other laws impacting the safety function.

Occupational accidents have a massive personal and social cost as well as a major financial cost. The construction industry is one of the most dangerous industries, accounting for around 20-30% of all occupational deaths worldwide. The accompanying financial cost is either absorbed directly or passed on in the form of higher insurance costs. In addition, regulatory bodies have started to impose legal accountability on all the parties along the construction supply chain. OHS is hard to implement. Construction projects are complex, with a fluid workforce, and the regulatory framework is highly elaborate. OHS Electronic Management Systems for Construction presents a theoretical framework which is designed to overcome these difficulties, integrating OHS management in construction using knowledge management and web technologies. This framework is explained in a clear step-by-step way, as are features such as a systematically developed corporate safety memory, and a virtual learning portal to facilitate on-demand safety training. The ultimate aim of this book is to aid the development of an established safety culture at the organisational level, and the formation of an industry-wide community of safety practice. This is essential reading for OHS professionals and construction managers attempting to change their industry for the better, as well as advanced students and researchers.

While it has aided far many more than it has harmed, radiation is forever etched in the public's mind as an indiscriminate and particularly pernicious killer. Consequently, it is especially critical in this age of terrorist threats that we equip ourselves with accurate information and practical tools that will serve us in the rare chance that we find ourselves in a radiation crisis. Radiation Threats and Your Safety: A Guide to Preparation and Response for Professionals and Community offers a calm and authoritative approach to crisis preparation. Written by a health physicist from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the book informs us about what we should know ahead of time, how to prepare, and the best ways to respond to a nuclear or radiological incident either as an emergency responder or community/family member. Organized to serve both as a preparation guide and as a reference in a crisis, this book - Uses common language while avoiding unnecessary scientific jargon Details protocols for both accidental and intentional radiation emergencies such as nuclear explosions and dirty bombs Shows how to prepare a family emergency plan Covers medical responses to radiation emergencies including radiation drugs Provides an emergency supply list Discusses radiation from microwaves and cellular phones as well as food irradiation There is no reason why we should feel helpless when faced with a radiation emergency. We can take action to protect ourselves, our families, and our communities. How we react to a radiation emergency will determine its true final impact. To this end, we need information and leaders we can depend upon. This book provides the factual details and the approach needed to proactively prepare for any radiation emergency, while a

Professionals in environmental health and safety (EHS) management use statistics every day in making decisions. This book was created to provide the quantitative tools and techniques necessary to make important EHS assessments. Readers need not be statistically or mathematically inclined to make the most of this book-mathematical derivations are kept to a minimum and subjects are approached in a simple and factual manner, complemented with plenty of real-world examples. Chapters 1-3 cover knowledge of basic statistical concepts such as presentation of data, measurements of location and dispersion, and elementary probability and distributions. Data gathering and analysis topics including sampling methods, sampling theory, testing, and interference as well as skills for critically evaluating published numerical material is presented in Chapters 4-6. Chapters 7-11 discuss information generation topics-regression and correlation analysis, time series, linear programming, network and Gnatt charting, and decision analysis-tools that can be used to convert data into meaningful information. Chapter 12 features six examples of projects made successful through statistical approaches being applied. Readers can use these approaches to solve their own unique problems. Whether you are a EHS professional, manager, or student, Health, Safety, and Environmental Data Analysis: A Business Approach will help you communicate statistical data effectively.

Professionals striving for accident reduction must deal with systems in which both technical and human elements play equal and complementary roles. However, many of the existing techniques in ergonomics and risk management concentrate on plant and technical issues and downplay human factors and "subjectivity." Safety Management: A Qualitative Systems Approach describes a body of theories and data that addresses safety by drawing on systems theory and applied psychology, stressing the importance of human activity within systems. It explains in detail the central roles of social consensus and reliability and the nature of verbal reports and functional discourse. This text presents a new approach to safety management, offering a path to both greater safety and to economic savings. It presents a series of methodological tools that have proven to be reliable through extensive use in the rail and nuclear industries. These methods allow organizational and systems failures to be analyzed much more effectively in terms of quantity, precision, and usefulness. The concepts and tools described in this book are particularly valuable for reliability engineers, risk managers, human factors specialists, and safety managers and professionals in safety-critical organizations.

A Practical Guide to the Safety Profession: The Relentless Pursuit will help reshape the way we talk about safety, prompt action, and engage workers from all levels of an organization. The book includes real-life experiences and characters that are relatable to anyone who has worked in the safety and health field for any amount of time. It will provide answers for every safety professional who has ever asked: "Is this actually making people safer?" It shines a light on ineffective practices that drive a wedge between the safety professional and the people they support and then provides meaningful alternative practices. Features Provides a streamlined process for eliminating high impact hazards Emphasizes concepts that are immediately actionable with little to no investment costs Includes real-life studies and examples

The Behavior-Based Safety Process Since the behavior-based approach to accident prevention was launched in 1980 by the author and his associates, safety performance is increasingly prominent on the agendas of many companies. Several powerful factors contribute to this trend. The widespread reorganization of personnel into work-groups that are leaner and more self-directed, the increasing importance of international competition, the growing awareness of critical environmental issues—these and related factors highlight the value of any mechanism that promotes continuous improvement in safety performance. Detailing a step-by-step approach to just such a mechanism for continuous improvement, The Behavior-Based Safety Process is a path-breaking guide that represents an important resource for anyone concerned with performance related issues in the workplace. As the title indicates, the focus is on process versus programs. The reason is simple: off-the-shelf safety imposed from the top down does not meet the safety needs of most organizations. This fact has been abundantly demonstrated in facility after facility throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In genuinely meeting the need for continuous improvement in safety performance, the behavior-based approach presents many parallels with the quality improvement process. Both of these approaches use scientific methods to identify, measure, and provide feedback on upstream factors of excellence. In the case of the behavior-based approach to safety, these upstream factors are critical behaviors that are the leading indicators of safety performance in the organization, targeting areas of concern in advance of even first-aid incidents. For an in-depth treatment of how to integrate behavioral and statistical methodologies, see the author’s companion volume from Van Nostrand Reinhold: Employee-Driven Systems for Safe Behavior. In addition to presenting these parallels with quality. The Behavior-Based Safety Process also provides powerful techniques aimed at implementation issues: organizational development, trainer-training, and employee involvement. The author and his associates developed these techniques over a decade of consultation with a variety of industries, working closely in that time with such safety leaders as Monsanto, Shell Chemical Company, ARCO Chemical, ALCOA, Rohm and Haas, Scott Paper Company, Georgia Gulf Corporation, The Pillsbury Company, and Chevron U.S.A.

In the early twentieth century, asbestos had a reputation as a lifesaver. In 1960, however, it became known that even relatively brief exposure to asbestos can cause mesothelioma, a virulent and lethal cancer.
Yet the bulk of the world's asbestos was mined after 1960. Asbestos usage in many countries continued unabated.
This is the first global history of how the asbestos industry and its allies in government, insurance, and medicine defended the product throughout the twentieth century. It explains how mining and manufacture could continue despite overwhelming medical evidence as to the risks. The argument advanced in this book is that asbestos has proved so enduring because the industry was able to mount a successful defense strategy for the mineral--a strategy that still operates in some parts of the world. This defence involved the shaping of the public debate by censoring, and sometimes corrupting, scientific research, nurturing scientific uncertainty, and using allies in government, insurance, and medicine.
The book also discusses the problems of asbestos in the environment, compensating victims, and the continued use of asbestos in the developing world. Its global focus shows how asbestos can be seen as a model for many occupational diseases--indeed for a whole range of hazards produced by industrial societies. The book is based on a wealth of documentary material gained from legal discovery, supplemented by evidence from the authors' visits and researches in the US, the UK, Canada, Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, Australia, Swaziland, and South Africa.

Chemical and biochemical Laboratories are full of potentially dangerous chemicals and equipment. 'Safety in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Laboratory' provides the necessary information needed for working with these chemicals and apparatus to avoid: fires, explosions, toxic fumes, skin burns, poisoning and other hazards. Both authors, Andr? Picot and Philippe Grenouillet, are recognized authorities in the field of lab safety, and their book arrange the information not available in similar publications. It is addressed to members of Chemical Health& Safety as well as working chemists in labs everywhere. Also Lab managers will find the book a useful addition to their bookshelf.

The goal of this book is to prepare safety and health professionals to recognize and address human resource issues, applicable laws and regulations, as well as change management techniques used to alter the safety culture within their operations. This book will provide awareness to avoid or address HR related policies/issues/laws which can result in costly litigation, grievances, and other negative implications. The book will address the "pitfalls" for safety professionals to avoid as well as provide the methodology to attain the cultural change necessary to achieve and maintain safety performance. Features Prepares safety professionals how to avoid or address HR issues and laws Provides awareness of applicable labor and employment laws and regulations Covers change management skills applicable to the safety function Enables the safety professional to recognize legal requirements from everyday questions asked by employees Helps safety professionals to prevent becoming entangled in legal issues resulting from their actions or inactions

Fueled by more than 40 years in the safety industry and having conducted thousands of interviews with managers and workers worldwide, Ron C. McKinnon confronts the safety industry's most prevalent and dangerous myths head-on in Changing Safety's Paradigms. This book lists the most prominent safety paradigms, or myths seen all over the world and gives advice on how they can be changed for the better. Around the world, the work injury rate is increasing, and more and more people are been killed at work each year. Man-made disasters continue to occur, and all are the result of accidents, or undesired events. One of the reasons why safety is not improving is because it is surrounded by numerous myths. These paradigms hamper the progress of safety in the workplace. Only by identifying and examining these misconceptions can progress in the reduction of accidental losses be made. Numerous case studies and true to life examples in Changing Safety's Paradigms give insight into how safety myths can be changed. No other book has been written about safety's paradigms and how to change them since many others do not want to challenge the status quo or rock the boat. Changing Safety's Paradigms tackles issues in a practical manner and provides advice and guidance that can be applied immediately in the workplace. These recommendations will result in a more focused safety management system and a reduction in the number of accidents.

The tenth of a new, well-received, and highly acclaimed series on critical infrastructure and homeland security, Communications Sector Protection and Homeland Security is an eye-opening account and an important reference source of a complex sector. Communications systems are the backbone for much of the critical infrastructure within the United States and many of the other infrastructure components are completely dependent on them to perform their missions. They serve part in parcel with other key national security and emergency preparedness resources. This book examines the importance that communication sector has for national security policy and issues of homeland security.

Wellbeing is now at the top of almost everyone's agenda and many technical books have been published on the topic. More than that, an ever-increasing number of organisations are understanding that getting wellbeing right is a win-win that can boost profits or simply make sustainability viable. Organised Wellbeing: Proven and Practical Lessons from Safety Excellence seeks to present, in a user-friendly way, all of the key wellbeing themes. It views these through the lessons learnt from safety excellence because, at present, UK safety is world class but, frankly, wellbeing seldom is. In any organisation, culture is even more important than strategy and tactics, and training is just the base of a process in which facilitation and embedding of key behaviours and mindsets is the essential element. Practical and coordinated processes, not initiatives, are required. This book, therefore, seeks to show how aspects of wellbeing, both organisational and personal, are inexorably interconnected. From an organisational perspective, approaches need to address the truth that 'good work is good for you'. This book, also an individual guide to thriving with passion, compassion, humour and style, is essential reading for health and safety, occupational health and HR professionals at all levels. It is also highly recommended for all managers and staff who seek to maximise their potential and that of their colleagues.

Wellbeing is now at the top of almost everyone's agenda and many technical books have been published on the topic. More than that, an ever-increasing number of organisations are understanding that getting wellbeing right is a win-win that can boost profits or simply make sustainability viable. Organised Wellbeing: Proven and Practical Lessons from Safety Excellence seeks to present, in a user-friendly way, all of the key wellbeing themes. It views these through the lessons learnt from safety excellence because, at present, UK safety is world class but, frankly, wellbeing seldom is. In any organisation, culture is even more important than strategy and tactics, and training is just the base of a process in which facilitation and embedding of key behaviours and mindsets is the essential element. Practical and coordinated processes, not initiatives, are required. This book, therefore, seeks to show how aspects of wellbeing, both organisational and personal, are inexorably interconnected. From an organisational perspective, approaches need to address the truth that 'good work is good for you'. This book, also an individual guide to thriving with passion, compassion, humour and style, is essential reading for health and safety, occupational health and HR professionals at all levels. It is also highly recommended for all managers and staff who seek to maximise their potential and that of their colleagues.

How can we care so much about health care yet so little about public health? Before Covid-19, public health programs constituted only 2.5 percent of all US health spending, with the other 97.5 percent going towards the larger health care system. In fact, the United States spends on average $11,000 per citizen per year on health care, but only $286 per person on public health. It seems that Americans value health care, the medical care of individuals, over public health, the well-being of collections of people. In Me vs. Us, primary care doctor and public health advocate Michael Stein takes a hard, insightful look at the larger questions behind American health and health care. He offers eight reasons why our interest in the technologies and delivery of health care supersedes our interest in public health and its focus on the core social, economic, and environmental forces that shape health. Stein documents how public health has continually "lost out" to medicine-from a loss in funding and resources to how we view our personal priorities-and suggests how public health may hold the solutions to our most concerning crises, from pandemics to obesity to climate change. Me vs. Us concludes that individual and public health are inseparable. In the end, Stein argues, we need to recover and sharpen our sense of health based on a reverent appreciation of both perspectives.

Whether you call them work-related upper limb disorders (WRULDs), cumulative trauma disorders (CTDS), or occupational overuse syndromes (OOSs), these conditions are a cause of pain, disability and suffering to workers worldwide. These designations often imply that their causes are related to work, but the supporting evidence can be unclear. Transparency is important, especially when it is necessary to form a connection with work factors to obtain treatment or compensation. This book addresses the dilemma. Written by a professional ergonomist with almost 40 years of experience in workplace ergonomics, this book combines a critical summary and assessment of the epidemiological literature with an exploration of the scientific and medical evidence for possible causal mechanisms to develop well-informed conclusions on causation of a number of common musculoskeletal disorders of the upper limb and intervertebral disc injury. Although much of the book focuses on physical factors, the role of psychosocial factors is increasingly being recognized and an additional chapter reviews a number of the current theories relating to this important issue. Features Focuses on a clear and authoritative account of the evidence for the role of work in the causation of commonly occurring ULDs and disc injury Provides an up-to-date compilation of the scientific evidence, devoid of views based on assumptions or prejudice Presents a clear explanation of the most likely causal mechanisms for common ULDs and disc injuries Includes a summary of theories concerning the role played by psychosocial factors Outlines the statistical evidence in a clear and understandable manner Bridges the gap between the evidence-base in the scientific and medical research literature and the practitioner

Situations and systems are easier to change than the human condition - particularly when people are well-trained and well-motivated, as they usually are in maintenance organisations. This is a down-to-earth practitioner's guide to managing maintenance error, written in Dr. Reason's highly readable style. It deals with human risks generally and the special human performance problems arising in maintenance, as well as providing an engineer's guide for their understanding and the solution. After reviewing the types of error and violation and the conditions that provoke them, the author sets out the broader picture, illustrated by examples of three system failures. Central to the book is a comprehensive review of error management, followed by chapters on:- managing person, the task and the team; - the workplace and the organization; - creating a safe culture; It is then rounded off and brought together, in such a way as to be readily applicable for those who can make it work, to achieve a greater and more consistent level of safety in maintenance activities. The readership will include maintenance engineering staff and safety officers and all those in responsible roles in critical and systems-reliant environments, including transportation, nuclear and conventional power, extractive and other chemical processing and manufacturing industries and medicine.

The 1898 suppression of white phosphorous in the French match industry was a victory of organized labour. At a time when most French workers did not have the power to effect changes in the health and safety conditions of their work, the match workers succeeded. At a time when most French women were not unionised and did not pursue effective action on occupational health problems, French women in the match industry succeeded. This book, first published in 1989, examines their actions and provides the definitive account of their success.

Systems thinking tells us that human error, violations and technology failures result from poorly designed and managed work systems. To help us understand and prevent injuries and incidents, incident reporting systems must be capable of collecting data on contributory factors from across the overall work system, in addition to factors relating to the immediate context of the event (e.g. front-line workers, environment, and equipment). This book describes how to design a practical, usable incident reporting system based on this approach. The book contains all the information needed to effectively design and implement a new incident reporting system underpinned by systems thinking. It also provides guidance on how to evaluate and improve existing incident reporting systems so they are practical for users, collect good quality data, and reflect the principles of systems thinking. Features Highlights the key principles of systems thinking for designing incident reporting systems Outlines a process for developing and testing incident reporting systems Describes how to evaluate incident reporting systems to ensure they are practical, usable, and collect good quality data Provides detailed guidance on how to analyze incident data, and translate the findings into appropriate incident prevention strategies

Health care is under tremendous pressure regarding efficiency, safety, and economic viability. It has responded by adopting techniques that have been useful in other industries, such as quality management, lean production, and high reliability - although with limited, and all-too-often disappointing, results. The Resilient Health Care Network (RHCN) has worked since 2011 to facilitate the interaction and collaboration among practitioners and researchers interested in applying concepts from resilience engineering to health care and patient safety. This has met with considerable success, not least because the focus from the start was on developing concrete ways to complement a Safety-I perspective with a Safety-II perspective. Building on previous volumes, Delivering Resilient Health Care presents documented experiences and practical guidance on how to bring Resilient Health Care into practice. It provides concrete advice on how to prepare a study, how to choose the right data, how to collect it, how to analyse the data, and how to interpret the results. This fourth book in the Resilient Healthcare series contains contributions from international experts in health care, organisational studies and patient safety, as well as resilience engineering. This book provides a practical guide for delivering resilient healthcare, particularly for clinicians on the frontline of care unsure how to incorporate resilience into their everyday work, managers coordinating care, and for policymakers hoping to steer the system in the right direction. Other groups - patients, the media, and researchers - will also find much of interest here.