Articles

-Document Readability and Human Factors- In the event that you are one of the eighteen people worldwide who missed it as anything from a live event to a meme, Steve Harvey, the host of the 2015 Miss Universe competition, named Miss Columbia as Miss Universe when it was Miss Philippines who had won. Harvey had … Continue reading And the Winner is…

-Safety Events Policies in Healthcare- In patient care we are taught not to euphemize. He hasn’t passed away; she isn’t lost; they haven’t departed. We use the word dead, because there can be no misunderstanding, and no false hope. For what must happen next to begin, the gravity of the information has to be clear. … Continue reading “Safety Events” and other Faded Giants

When US Airways First Officer Jeff Skiles appeared with physician, pilot, and healthcare safety expert Terry Fairbanks in a plenary presentation at the National Safety Foundation in 2012, Fairbanks joked that to demonstrate the way things can be different depending on the lens you look at them from, he had reframed his talk to discuss … Continue reading Someone to Blame; Moral Luck and the Outcome Bias

-Supporting Personnel after Adverse Events-    Google The National Transportation Safety Board, and in the top ten results you’ll find a Hollywood film review. NTSB members are reacting to ‘Sully’, the Clint Eastwood film starring Tom Hanks, which has been widely promoted as the true story of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the US Airways Captain who … Continue reading “Based On a True Story”

This is a tough-love talk. Can you handle it? Reporting is a crucial ingredient in a culture of safety. We can neither analyze nor react to information we don’t have.Your corporate policy should, and likely does, clearly identify reportable events and instruct your personnel to report them. So you’re done, right? It’s in the commandments. … Continue reading Ten Ways Your Organization May Be Defeating its Own Reporting Goals

-The Emergency Services Safety Fraternity-   Emergency Service Just Culture expert Paul LeSage defines a high-consequence organization as one in which “…operations are one human error or at-risk behaviour away from causing harm.” Certainly, Emergency Services are such organizations. Aviation has long been viewed as a leader in safety systems that acknowledge risk and value a … Continue reading Not “Just Policy”

-Policy and Predictability-    The actions of human drivers resulted in over 32,000 traffic fatalities in the United States in 2014. While it’s a staggering number of deaths, automobile safety has been steadily improving with the continual addition of safety features- seatbelts, airbags, reversing cameras and automatic crash avoidance systems. And now, coming to a … Continue reading Take Me To The Pentagon

-Writing Policies with Purpose- When I was growing up, we didn’t recycle. It wasn’t a ‘thing’ back then. That was a time when sparking caps with a parent’s lit cigarette while riding unrestrained in the back of a station wagon was a family vacation; when caring for the environment meant watering down the paint before … Continue reading More Than Pretty Garbage