Tens of thousands of patients die unnecessarily every year as a result of errors and defects in our healthcare processes. Those that survive often pay too much for the privilege. The value stream mapping methods described in Mapping Clinical Value Streams will help you achieve more efficient health care processes and will pave the way to an improved medical system with significantly reduced medical errors and other costly waste.Part of the Lean Tools in Healthcare series, this user-friendly book will help you understand how to use value stream mapping to provide quality, patient-centered care. Value stream mapping is a powerful tool for observing and depicting processes as they truly are and for envisioning and reconfiguring the same processes to eliminate errors and other waste. With this book, you'll learn how to: Map current-state processes Create a future-state map with processes streamlined through "flow" and "pull" Manage the rollout of your future state with "A3" project plans Presented in a highly organized and easy-to-assimilate format, the book includes examples from actual healthcare processes, plus numerous illustrations and margin assists that call your attention to key points. Value stream mapping icons make it easy to see and understand the ebb and flow of healthcare processes. Each chapter also includes a summary for quick review. Throughout the book you will be asked to reflect on questions that will help you apply these concepts and techniques to your own workplace.To be competitive in today's marketplace, you cannot afford to leave processes unexamined, or let them become haphazard. You must apply conscious, quality attention to continuously see and fix your healthcare processes. In Mapping Clinical Value Streams, Shingo Prize-winning author Thomas L. Jackson shows you how.

This book is part of a series of titles that are a spin-off of the Shingo Prize-winning book Leveraging Lean in Healthcare: Transforming Your Enterprise into a High Quality Patient Care Delivery System. Each book in the series focuses on a specific aspect of healthcare that has demonstrated significant process and quality improvements after a Lean implementation.The result of implementing Lean in the surgical suite is a powerful and proven mix that enables members of cross-functional teams to improve their processes, efficiency, and financial performance. Leveraging Lean in Surgical Services: Creating a Cost Effective, Standardized, High Quality, Patient-Focused Operation provides a functional understanding of Lean processes and quality improvement techniques for the surgical department. This book is an ideal guide for healthcare executives, leaders, process improvement team members, and inquisitive frontline workers who want to implement and leverage Lean in the surgical suite. Supplying detailed descriptions of Lean tools and methodologies, it identifies powerful solutions specific to the needs of surgical services.The first section provides an overview of Lean concepts, tools, methodologies, and applications. The second section focuses on the application of Lean in the surgical services environment. Presenting numerous examples, stories, case studies, and lessons learned, it examines the normal operation of each area in the surgical suite and highlights the areas where typical problems occur.Next, the book walks readers through various Lean initiatives and demonstrates how Lean tools and concepts have been used to achieve lasting improvements to processes and quality of care. It also introduces actionable blueprints that readers can duplicate or modify for use in their own institutions.Illustrating leadership's role in achieving departmental goals, this book will provide you with a well-rounded understandin

Improving the quality of healthcare, while increasing accessibility and lowering costs, is a complex dilemma facing rural communities around the world. The Center for Rural Pennsylvania believed that telehealth, the use of electronic information and telecommunications technologies to support long-distance clinical healthcare was a viable solution so it recently provided grants to conduct a thorough investigation into the factors involved.Telehealth in Rural Hospitals: Lessons Learned from Pennsylvania reports the outcome of this year-long investigation. Illustrating telehealth implementations in rural settings, it supplies an overview of telehealth as well as an assessment of its economic impact.The book skillfully intertwines the research and academic aspects of telehealth with helpful insights from the author. One of the most important discoveries made by the author and her team of researchers is that all too often money is wasted by implementing telehealth for services that don't impact many people. This book shares valuable insights on using telehealth for integrative health practices that could improve the health of a greater portion of the population.This book illustrates how telehealth can, indeed, be the healthcare savior that some people believe it will be, but only under the right circumstances. It details exactly what those circumstances are so that everyone, including clinicians, patients, government entities, and vendors, can steer toward the best future path.The author identifies the obstacles preventing wider implementation of telehealth and explains how recent federal legislation will affect telehealth implementation in rural communities. She also points out the folly of developing electronic health records before federal data standards are put into place.The book concludes by detailing best practices and lessons learned for implementing a telehealth program in any state. It also outl

How much risk should we take? A Short Guide to Risk Appetite sets out to help all those who need to decide how much risk can be taken in a particular risky and important situation. David Hillson and Ruth Murray-Webster introduce the RARA Model to explain the complementary and central roles of Risk Appetite and Risk Attitude, and along the way they show how other risk-related concepts fit in. Risk thresholds are the external expression of inherent risk appetite, and the challenge is how to set the right thresholds. By progressively deconstructing the RARA Model, the authors show that the essential control step is our ability to choose an appropriate risk attitude. The book contains practical guidance to setting risk thresholds that take proper account of the influences of organisational risk culture and the individual risk preferences of key stakeholders. Alongside this, individuals and organisations need to choose the risk attitude that will optimise their chances of achieving the desired objectives.

Intuitive Imagery puts the discoveries of modern science to work through a simple, proven technology to meet the challenges of our fast-paced changing world. This book shows you how to harness the wisdom of your inner images to achieve peak performance in both business and personal life. Results include greater creativity, better decision making, enhanced productivity, the unlocking of blocked potential, accelerated learning, increased success, and a sense of greater well-being. Learning to use intuitive imaging is like finding a new set of lenses through which to view the world. It helps us change our beliefs about how we know what we know so we can begin to restructure how we do what we do. John B. Pehrson is president of Creative Change Technologies, a training and consulting firm to individuals and organizations focusing in the areas of creativity, deep team building, and executive coaching. John is a former executive with DuPont and has over 20 years of broad international business experience that includes business and technology management, strategic planning, product development, manufacturing, sales and marketing. He lives in Signal Mountain, TN.Susan E. Mehrtons is president of The Potlatch Group, a research organization specializing in analysis of business trends related to global evolution and social change. Her clients range from Fortune 500 companies like AT&T, DuPont, General Motors, and Sears to smaller businesses, schools, and private foundations such as The Institute of Noetic Sciences and the World Business Academy. Sue is the co-author of Earthkeeping, an ecology text, and The Fourth Wave, a vision of business in the 21st century. She lives in Mineola, NY.

This book enumerates the purpose of clinical audit, the continuing value of clinical audit in a changing world of healthcare, and key issues and the key principles of audit practice. It sets out the core practical methodology of clinical audit, making clear how to conduct an audit project.

Health IT as a Tool for Prevention in Public Health Policies examines the current state of Health Information Technology (HIT) in the United States. It investigates the converging problems of chronic disease, societal welfare, childhood obesity, and the lack of healthcare for the economically disadvantaged in the U.S. It considers various providers of care for disadvantaged groups and outlines innovative public policy solutions to a wide range of community problems.The book starts by detailing the major problems the U.S. has faced with its healthcare system. Next, it describes current federal efforts to solve these problems and unveils novel solutions to these challenges. Each chapter examines a different technological solution that the U.S. is currently investing in and allocating time, resources, and energy to.Supplying a basic theoretical foundation on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, the book discusses the effects of geographic disparities and HIT at the meso, macro, and micro levels of society. It also demonstrates how individuals can use a range of HITs to improve prevention of health concerns, including mobile health apps, video games, self-management technologies, crowdsourcing, and other e-health technologies. The book describes HIEs, RHIOs, and NHIN and explains how they connect to Community Health Centers (CHCs). It also explains how CHCs can use HIT to improve care for the disadvantaged and Medicaid population. It includes a case study of electronic health literacy and cancer patients and another on how equipping private practice physicians with EMRs can help them tackle prevention and improve organizational functioning.The book concludes by providing a comparative perspective between the use of HIT in the U.S. and the United Kingdom and by suggesting the direction that the U.S. should take toward

Hospital staff and caregivers are regularly exposed to biomechanical overload risk, particularly at spine and shoulder level a risk factor that will continue to rise with the progressive aging of the population. Patient Handling in the Healthcare Sector: A Guide for Risk Management with MAPO Methodology (Movement and Assistance of Hospital Patients) details the analysis of patient handling risk using the MAPO method in different areas of healthcare and helps you develop strategies to mitigate them. Focusing on the organization of work, this approach gives you the tools to: Rapidly analyse the problem Rapidly identify solutions Effectively monitor the results of preventive actions One of the special features of this approach is that it employs tools that allow you to allocate financial resources to estimate what investments are needed to achieve specific results. This means taking the decision-making process out of the hands of ergonomics experts and putting it into those of healthcare facility administrators.

Winner of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's (HIMSS) 2015 Book of the Year Award Given the on-going changes and challenges faced by today's health care organizations, Organizational and Process Reengineering Approaches for Health Care Transformation provides a practical, leader-led and team-based approach for reengineering organizations and transforming leaders and teams while creating new processes in the health care industry. It supplies a framework for organizational change to enable senior leaders to reengineer and transform their health care organizations.The book presents proven and effective approaches and methodologies for leadership teams to help their organizations transform, thrive and grow. It goes beyond process improvement and other organizational change approaches, as it offers an integrated holistic approach that provides sustainable results.The approach described in this book has already helped many large health care organizations dramatically improve their effectiveness by creating new service lines, lines of business, population health initiatives, new care management models as well as implementing game changing solutions and technology.Well-grounded in organizational change and project management principles, this approach will help to ensure that the resulting work is implemented, accepted, and sustained by process owners and senior leaders. Descriptive case studies illustrate the practical application of the tools and techniques discussed.The approach and mind-set outlined in the book allow, and even require, that all stakeholders come to the table. They do not require an engineering degree, expensive certifications, or the use of complicated processes or tools. They will not replace current improvement methods, but instead provide an organization-based framework to help you leverage and enhance your improvement efforts.

This book provides a set of detailed instructions to help you construct your departmental, divisional, or organizational functional tree structure (FTS) and work towards world-class service. Preparing for Continuous Quality Improvement for Healthcare: Sustainability through Functional Tree Structures outlines a method that will enable your organization to set a stable base for future improvements that are sustainable and create breakthrough improvements in service, quality, and costs.More importantly, the FTS method outlined in the book will provide you with the tools to build processes tailored to your customers specifications and standards. It will enable you to improve your department, division, and entire organization and edge ahead of your competition.The book explains why organizations steeped in process improvement need to re-evaluate and re-establish their procedures especially if initial outcomes have not met expectations. Illustrating key concepts with examples, case studies, and flow charts, it provides you with a clear understanding of organizational functional structure and how to document current organizational and departmental functional tree structures.Describing how to identify a department's functional deficits, shortcomings, and waste, it explains how to select the best course of action for your organization. After reading this book, you will be able to create a pictorial representation of your organization's current functional structure and select the best course of action for achieving sustainable advancements in service, quality, and costs.The book will help to convert your managers from a people-management mentality to one of process management transforming leaders to educators and not guards.

In today's healthcare economy, with reduced reimbursement and closer scrutiny of quality patient care, the concepts and terminology of Lean management are becoming invaluable to nurses, clinicians, administrators, and other healthcare staff involved in improvement. Conversely, a basic grasp of common healthcare terms is essential for process improvement specialists who aren't necessary fluent in healthcare terminology.The Lean Healthcare Dictionary: An Illustrated Guide to Using the Language of Lean Management in Healthcare is designed to bridge the gap between Lean practitioners and healthcare professionals. This comprehensive dictionary defines essential Lean and healthcare terms to help create a common language for anyone involved in Lean healthcare improvement activities. Providing quick reference to the language of Lean management in healthcare, the dictionary includes diagrams and charts that illustrate concepts and aid in understanding. Each entry in Part I provides a succinct description of a Lean term as used in a healthcare setting. Healthcare terms and acronyms that commonly arise in the course of Lean transformations are defined in Part II.The content of this dictionary is firmly rooted in the hands-on experience of Rona Consulting Group, whose principals have designed and led groundbreaking applications of Lean management in emergency rooms, operating rooms, labs, hospitals, and major medical centers.

Part of the Lean Tools for Healthcare series, this user-friendly book will help to improve your understanding of kaizen. It describes exactly what a kaizen event is and details all the phases necessary for implementing continuous improvement practices in your healthcare organization. Kaizen Workshops for Lean Healthcare walks you through the steps of conducting an effective kaizen workshop one that is well planned, well implemented, and well monitored. The information is presented in an easy-to-assimilate format. Numerous illustrations reinforce the text and margin assists call your attention to key terms, healthcare examples, and how-to steps. Throughout the book, you will be asked to reflect on questions that will help you apply the concepts and techniques in your own workplace. Defining the key concepts and elements of the "production" of healthcare services, the text delineates the differences between healthcare processes and the individual cycles of work that those processes link together. It also: Provides foundational information on kaizen and kaizen workshops defining the key roles for success Explains exactly how to plan and prepare Presents examples of how to present workshop results and how to follow up Includes a concise summary of kaizen workshop steps Supplies a list of additional resources for learning more about the different kinds of improvement methodologies you might want to implement in your kaizen workshops If your healthcare organization fully applies the steps detailed in this book, it will gain much more than the knowledge of how to conduct a workshop. Through kaizen, you will empower your employees to make positive change a reality. And incrementally, kaizen workshops will become more than isolated events they will become the way all work is done in your organization.

Increasing costs and higher utilization of resources make the role of process improvement more important than ever in the health care industry. Management Engineering: A Guide to Best Practices for Industrial Engineering in Health Care provides an overview of the practice of industrial engineering (management engineering) in the health care industry.Explaining how to maximize the unique skills of management engineers in a health care setting, the book provides guidance on tried and true techniques that can be implemented easily in most organizations. Filled with tools and documents to help readers communicate more effectively, it includes many examples and case studies that illustrate the proper application of these tools and techniques.Containing the contributions of accomplished healthcare process engineers and process improvement professionals, the book examines Lean, Six Sigma, and other process improvement methodologies utilized by management engineers. Illustrating the various roles an industrial engineer might take on in health care, it provides readers with the practical understanding required to make the most of time-tested performance improvement tools in the health care industry.Suitable for IE students and practicing industrial engineers considering a move into the health care industry, or current healthcare industrial engineers wishing to expand their practice, the text can be used as a reference to explore individual topics, as each of the chapters stands on its own. Also, senior healthcare executives will find that the book provides insights into how the practice of management engineering can provide sustainable improvements in their organizations. To get a good overview of how your organization can best benefit from the efforts of industrial engineers, this book is a must-read.

Hospitals and health systems are facing many challenges, including shrinking reimbursements and the need to improve patient safety and quality. A growing number of healthcare organizations are turning to the Lean management system as an alternative to traditional cost cutting and layoffs. "Kaizen," which is translated from Japanese as "good change" or "change for the better," is a core pillar of the Lean strategy for today's best healthcare organizations.Kaizen is a powerful approach for creating a continuously learning and continuously improving organizations. A Kaizen culture leads to everyday actions that improve patient care and create better workplaces, while improving the organization's long-term bottom line. The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen is the perfect introduction to executives and leaders who want to create and support this culture of continuous improvement.The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen is an introduction to kaizen principles and an overview of the leadership behaviors and mindsets required to create a kaizen culture or a culture of continuous improvement. The book is specifically written for busy C-level executives, vice presidents, directors, and managers who need to understand the power of this methodology. The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen shares real and practical examples and stories from leading healthcare organizations, including Franciscan St. Francis Health System, located in Indiana. Franciscan St. Francis employees and physicians have implemented and documented 4,000 Kaizen improvements each of the last three years, resulting in millions of dollars in hard savings and softer benefits for patients and staff. Chapters cover topics such as the need for Kaizen, different types of Kaizen (including Rapid Improvement Events and daily Kaizen), creating a Kaizen culture, practical methods for facilitating Kaiz

Over the past few decades and throughout the world, numerous government-initiated experiments and attempts at directly engaging and including citizens have emerged as remedies for a variety of problems faced by modern democracies, including political disaffection and insufficient capacity to deal with the complexity inherent in many contemporary public problems, such as climate change and segregation. In practice, these attempts are given many names, such as citizen panels, deliberative fora, collaborative dialogues, etc. In the academic literature as well, the phenomenon falls under many different headings, for instance collaborative, deliberative or interactive governance. Participatory Governance and Representative Democracy refers to this empirical phenomenon as local participatory governance, that is, government-sponsored direct participation between invited citizens and local officials in concrete arrangements and concerning problems that affect them. Participatory governance, we argue, may take many forms, regarding (1) type of interaction and type of communication between participants within the specific participatory arrangement (e.g., deliberative vs. aggregative) as well as regarding (2) the relation and connection between the specific arrangement and the more traditional representative structures (e.g., compatible, incompatible, transformative or irrelevant). The proposed edited volume addresses the matter of institutionalization, highlighting the difficulties associated with establishing stability and a shared understanding of the roles and rules among citizens, local politicians and administrators in participatory arrangements.

Historically, there has been a lack of parity between women and men in senior corporate roles, particularly in major companies with the biggest market capitalisation. This can be partly explained by inequalities of career opportunity and also women's self-perceptions. Yet there are plenty of examples in business and other worlds, notably politics, that women can perform effectively in the highest leadership roles. Some countries have actively encouraged greater female representation on the boards of major companies. This is a positive step forward. When women join the boards of top companies, the decision-making climates of these bodies can change for the better. When women are appointed as leaders of poorly performing companies they can turn them around and convert them into success stories every bit as often as male appointees. Women have been dismissed as lacking the character for business leadership. Sometimes, women are their own worst enemies and feel uncomfortable when members of their own gender act more like men. Yet, self-belief can strengthen their perceived suitability for top jobs. Women do need to act tougher to get to the top, but this does not mean abandoning their femininity or having a fulfilling life outside business. Why Women Should Be Taken More Seriously in the Boardroom is a useful tool for business students as well as those in the corporate world looking to gain a deeper understanding of gender balance within leadership roles.

Despite its frequency and its potential severity, preventable medical harm is still prominent in American hospitals and continues to put an alarming amount of lives at risk, being the third leading cause of death in the United States. Even some of the most commonly performed surgeries, such as knee and hip replacements, are resulting in a rapidly increasing rate of surgical site infections. Patricia Morrill's book is specifically written for the healthcare industry. It fills the need for exposing how preventable harm is a systemwide problem and provides a step-by-step model to apply for raising process improvement to a strategic level. The approach is ideal for team training purposes. The Perils of Un-Coordinated Healthcare gives the reader both a personal and professional view of the impact of preventable medical harm, using case studies and observations on preventable deaths and healthcare practice alongside recommended research topics and resources. By looking at the work of both healthcare workers and their managing executives, this instructional text gives methods to assess workforces and self-assess the performances of managers. The book equips readers with a 360 view: patients, families, physicians, workforce, leaders and culture. Morrill's ten-step model of Process Improvement Strategy Deployment integrates Lean and Project Management methodologies for developing a problem-solving culture and initiating process improvement at a strategic level. It is essential reading for those in the healthcare industry.

Historically, there has been a lack of parity between women and men in senior corporate roles, particularly in major companies with the biggest market capitalisation. This can be partly explained by inequalities of career opportunity and also women's self-perceptions. Yet there are plenty of examples in business and other worlds, notably politics, that women can perform effectively in the highest leadership roles. Some countries have actively encouraged greater female representation on the boards of major companies. This is a positive step forward. When women join the boards of top companies, the decision-making climates of these bodies can change for the better. When women are appointed as leaders of poorly performing companies they can turn them around and convert them into success stories every bit as often as male appointees. Women have been dismissed as lacking the character for business leadership. Sometimes, women are their own worst enemies and feel uncomfortable when members of their own gender act more like men. Yet, self-belief can strengthen their perceived suitability for top jobs. Women do need to act tougher to get to the top, but this does not mean abandoning their femininity or having a fulfilling life outside business. Why Women Should Be Taken More Seriously in the Boardroom is a useful tool for business students as well as those in the corporate world looking to gain a deeper understanding of gender balance within leadership roles.

CSR is a fragile concept if conceived only at the organizational level or driven only by leadership will. Many writers deal with aspects of social responsibility, but most deal with it as this kind of organizational and voluntary initiative. Few address the wider policy agenda. The contributors to Territories of Social Responsibility - researchers and practitioners from four continents - all participated in an international workshop co-ordinated by Patricia Almeida Ashley as part of her role as Chair in Development and Equity at the International Institute of Social Studies. They form a policy network contributing to studies on the concept of a multi-actor, multilevel and territorial approach to social responsibility and governance, oriented towards global, regional or local development and equity goals. This book introduces a new conceptual framework and promotes a research and policy agenda relating to it. A new model sees CSR embedded in institutional and legal frameworks, communicated and understood through a vector of communication and knowledge influencing situated culture and social values, and classified into three levels of ethical challenges. All of this can be expressed into the social processes of education, governance, the development of civil society, and policy making - a renovation of the existing perspectives on the concept of social responsibility. This ground breaking book integrates conceptual and empirical contributions and opens a research and policy agenda for the future. It will appeal to academics, higher level students, policy makers, and to leaders of and advisors to organizations affected by social responsibility issues.

The book takes as its starting point the crisis of healthcare in the UK: impossible health targets managed through command and control management and a stomach-churning rise in racism, whistleblowing and victimisation in the NHS. The use of nationally set productivity targets combined with austerity cuts have increasingly put clinical best-practice into direct conflict with funding. Health targets have become politically controlled, and performance has become a cynical exercise in ticking boxes, cascaded within trusts and bulldozed through frontline services. This has led directly to a precarious system of employment relations, subject to the continual restructuring of services rather than the goal of creating functioning interdisciplinary teams that stand a chance of capturing clinical excellence. This book is written for workers and managers who are on the frontline of the battle for decent healthcare. The content of this book is based on the 'ordinary' expertise of the people who are actually surviving it and helpful ideas about making the best out of a bad lot. Surviving Work in Healthcare will be of interest to healthcare professionals and anyone working on the frontline of healthcare as well as students of management, human resources and psychology.

Despite its frequency and its potential severity, preventable medical harm is still prominent in American hospitals and continues to put an alarming amount of lives at risk, being the third leading cause of death in the United States. Even some of the most commonly performed surgeries, such as knee and hip replacements, are resulting in a rapidly increasing rate of surgical site infections. Patricia Morrill's book is specifically written for the healthcare industry. It fills the need for exposing how preventable harm is a systemwide problem and provides a step-by-step model to apply for raising process improvement to a strategic level. The approach is ideal for team training purposes. The Perils of Un-Coordinated Healthcare gives the reader both a personal and professional view of the impact of preventable medical harm, using case studies and observations on preventable deaths and healthcare practice alongside recommended research topics and resources. By looking at the work of both healthcare workers and their managing executives, this instructional text gives methods to assess workforces and self-assess the performances of managers. The book equips readers with a 360 view: patients, families, physicians, workforce, leaders and culture. Morrill's ten-step model of Process Improvement Strategy Deployment integrates Lean and Project Management methodologies for developing a problem-solving culture and initiating process improvement at a strategic level. It is essential reading for those in the healthcare industry.

Critical approaches to leadership studies have sought to challenge the normative position of leadership as residing solely within the formal leader and have gone as far as to undermine the traditionally held assumption of leadership as a "real" phenomenon. The book offers a critical account of the nature of leadership and management in modern organizations. Specifically it examines the forces that affect the influence relationships between leaders and followers in public sector organizational settings and thus, how these relationships inform social influence processes. Although the book focuses on the case of a public sector organization in the UK, the findings are placed in the context of both leadership theory and research across the globe and the dissemination of 'new public management' worldwide. By acknowledging the criticisms concerning the weaknesses of conventional or mainstream leadership study and through the adoption of a critical perspective, Critical Leadership provides a deep and rich interpretation of the empirical material on leadership, thus making an outstanding contribution to the current literature.

The government budget should be the financial mirror of society's choices. Yet most people view budgeting as the epitome of eye-glazing subjects, rarely explained in a way that is understandable to the non-specialist and too often presented without adequate consideration of a country's governance and institutional capacity. Government Budgeting and Expenditure Management fills a gap in the literature to redress these failings and does so in comparative international perspective. This book provides a comprehensive but pithy and easy-to-understand treatment of public financial management, taking into account a variety of special issues including budgeting in post-conflict situations, at subnational government levels, for military/security expenditures, and in countries with large extractive revenues. Distilling the lessons of budgeting reform in countries at different levels of income and administrative capacity, each chapter gradually progresses from the basic principles to the more technical aspects and then on to implementation issues, using concrete examples and illustrations from around the globe. Government Budgeting and Expenditure Management is ideally suited as the primary text for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses in government budgeting or public financial management, or as a supplementary text for courses in public finance, public economics, economic development, public administration or comparative politics. With its attention to practical implementation aspects, the book will also be of direct interest to practitioners, policy-makers, and government employee training organizations.

This book explores the managerial roles and responsibilities with regard to safety. Applying key legal requirements to the workplace, it looks at how workplace facilities are managed and how materials and equipment are used, stored and maintained for optimum effectiveness. It not only aids organisations to achieve success, but to maintain it.

Conventional wisdom says that Europe's crisis is a financial crisis. But is this really the case? In Industrial Poverty, economist Sven R. Larson, challenges this view and suggests instead that Europe is in a state of permanent economic decline. The crisis, says Larson, is in fact a welfare-state crisis. Over decades, government has grown too big for the private sector to pay for; when the recession hit in 2008 most European economies could no longer bear the burden of the welfare state. Raging deficits, accelerating unemployment and harsh austerity policies hurled the continent into more than a regular recession. Europe is entering a new economic state: industrial poverty. Using Sweden in the 1990s as an example, Larson shows how a welfare-state crisis combined with the wrong kind of austerity policies replaces prosperity with industrial poverty. In a desperate effort to balance the budget and save the welfare state in the midst of the crisis, the Swedish government subjected the country to some of the toughest austerity measures on record. The outcome was a permanent reduction in the standard of living for Swedish families as well as the standard of government services. Today, Europe is going through the same transition into industrial poverty. Tomorrow, it could be the United States, unless Congress and the President take decisive action against the runaway budget deficit.