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Journal of Patient Safety Mar 2022This article reviews several key aspects of the Theory of Active and Latent Failures, typically referred to as the Swiss cheese model of human error and accident... (Review)
Review
This article reviews several key aspects of the Theory of Active and Latent Failures, typically referred to as the Swiss cheese model of human error and accident causation. Although the Swiss cheese model has become well known in most safety circles, there are several aspects of its underlying theory that are often misunderstood. Some authors have dismissed the Swiss cheese model as an oversimplification of how accidents occur, whereas others have attempted to modify the model to make it better equipped to deal with the complexity of human error in health care. This narrative review aims to provide readers with a better understanding and greater appreciation of the Theory of Active and Latent Failures upon which the Swiss cheese model is based. The goal is to help patient safety professionals fully leverage the model and its associated tools when performing a root cause analysis as well as other patient safety activities.
Topics: Delivery of Health Care; Humans; Patient Safety; Root Cause Analysis
PubMed: 33852542
DOI: 10.1097/PTS.0000000000000810 -
BMC Pediatrics Sep 2021We looked at existing recommendations for preventing unintentional injuries in children under five years of age, and we attempted to identify the main sources used as... (Review)
Review
We looked at existing recommendations for preventing unintentional injuries in children under five years of age, and we attempted to identify the main sources used as evidence for formulating these recommendations.We conducted a literature search up to the 18th October 2019 by using key terms and manual search in selected sources. We summarized the recommendations and source of the evidence in tables for each of five areas of unintentional injuries: road traffic injuries, drowning, poisoning, thermal injuries, falls.In 2008, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a comprehensive report with strategies for child injury prevention for the European region. More recently, the WHO published several guidance documents focused on one area such as drowning, usually with a global focus. The PrevInfad workgroup (Spanish Association of Primary Care Pediatrics) updated their document on road safety in April 2019, providing recommendations and a summary of the existing evidence. Preventive strategies for injuries in childhood are mainly based on surveillance data and the identification of risk factors. The key strategies for preventing unintentional injuries are a combination of environmental and behaviour modification, that can be achieved through engineering, enforcement and education. Consequently, for this kind of strategies, it is important to evaluate the effectiveness of both the intervention itself, and the way the intervention is advised to parents and caretakers so that there is good compliance of the recommendation.
Topics: Accidental Falls; Accidental Injuries; Accidents, Traffic; Burns; Child; Child, Preschool; Drowning; Humans; Infant; Risk Factors; Wounds and Injuries
PubMed: 34496772
DOI: 10.1186/s12887-021-02517-2 -
Sante Publique (Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy,... 2022The study aims to assess the level of implementation of road safety interventions in Benin. (Review)
Review
OBJECTIVE
The study aims to assess the level of implementation of road safety interventions in Benin.
METHOD
The research is based on an evaluative study of road safety aimed to analyze the implementation and logic of road safety interventions, conducted in Benin in 2019. It combined a review of the gray literature and a qualitative component. The data were collected through documents and interviews in structures involved in road safety management.
RESULTS
Road safety was a national priority with one lead institution and several structures involved. There was a lack of consensus among stakeholders, insufficient framework documents, resources, legislative texts, and study data. Few roads were in good condition and very few allowed the separation of two-wheeled vehicles. The vehicle fleet was outdated. Various activities were carried out to raise awareness, to educate the population and to enforce the texts but they were insufficient and poorly coordinated. Reference hospitals had the minimum service to deal with trauma cases. The interventions had not yet resulted in a reduction in the number of injuries and fatalities by accidents, which was increasing.
CONCLUSION
Benin has made great efforts in the area of road safety. However, there are still some shortcomings to take into account.
Topics: Accidents, Traffic; Benin; Hospitals; Humans; Safety; Safety Management; Wounds and Injuries
PubMed: 35724110
DOI: 10.3917/spub.215.0763 -
Scientific Reports Dec 2022Predicting traffic accident duration is necessary for ensuring traffic safety. Several attempts have been made to achieve high prediction accuracy, but researchers have...
Predicting traffic accident duration is necessary for ensuring traffic safety. Several attempts have been made to achieve high prediction accuracy, but researchers have not considered traffic accident text data in much detail. The limited text data of the first report on an incident describes the characteristics of an accident that are initially available. This paper uses text data fusing and ensemble learning algorithms to build a model to predict an accident's duration, and a preprocessing scheme of accident duration text data is established. Next, the random forest (RF) algorithm is applied to select feature variables of text data related to the traffic incident duration. Last, a text feature vector is introduced to models such as decision tree, k nearest neighbor, support vector regression, random forest, Gradient Boosting Decision Tree, and Xtreme Gradient Boosting. Our results show that the improved RF model has good prediction accuracy with RMSE, MAPE and R. From this, the textual factors important to determining the duration of the accident are identified. Further, we investigated that the cumulative importance of 60% is sufficient for traffic accident prediction using text data. These results provide insights into minimizing traffic congestion related to accidents and contribute to the input optimization in text prediction.
Topics: Accidents, Traffic; Data Mining; Algorithms; Machine Learning
PubMed: 36509866
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-25988-4 -
The Science of the Total Environment May 2023The effects brought by climate change and the pandemic upon worker health and wellbeing are varied and necessitate the identification and implementation of improved... (Review)
Review
The effects brought by climate change and the pandemic upon worker health and wellbeing are varied and necessitate the identification and implementation of improved strategic interventions. This review aims, firstly, to assess how climate change affects occupational accidents, focusing on the impacts of extreme air temperatures and natural disasters; and, secondly, to analyze the role of the pandemic in this context. Our results show that the manifestations of climate change affect workers physically while on the job, psychologically, and by modifying the work environment and conditions; all these factors can cause stress, in turn increasing the risk of suffering a work accident. There is no consensus on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on work accidents; however, an increase in adverse mental effects on workers in contact with the public (specifically in healthcare) has been described. It has also been shown that this strain affects the risk of suffering an accident. During the pandemic, many people began to work remotely, and what initially appeared to be a provisional situation has been made permanent or semi-permanent in some positions and companies. However, we found no studies evaluating the working conditions of those who telework. In relation to the combined impact of climate change and the pandemic on occupational health, only publications focusing on the synergistic effect of heat due to the obligation to wear COVID-19-specific PPE, either outdoors or in poorly acclimatized indoor environments, were found. It is essential that preventive services establish new measures, train workers, and determine new priorities for adapting working conditions to these altered circumstances.
Topics: Humans; COVID-19; Climate Change; Pandemics; Occupational Health; Accidents
PubMed: 36773906
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162129 -
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Dec 2022New vehicles include several systems that improve their safety, comfort, and performance [...].
New vehicles include several systems that improve their safety, comfort, and performance [...].
Topics: Accidents, Traffic; Safety; Motor Vehicles
PubMed: 36616619
DOI: 10.3390/s23010022 -
Chinese Journal of Traumatology =... Mar 2021Trauma has been called the neglected disease of modern society. According to WHO, fall is the second major cause of trauma or deaths resulting from unintentional...
PURPOSE
Trauma has been called the neglected disease of modern society. According to WHO, fall is the second major cause of trauma or deaths resulting from unintentional accidents. The aim of this study was to investigate the different types of fall according to International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems 10th Revision (ICD-10) in hospitalized patients visiting specialized accident and trauma hospitals of Mashhad, Iran.
METHODS
This was a cross sectional retrospective study performed between March 20, 2013 and March 20, 2014. The research population consisted of all medical records of patients for fall injuries in three specialized accident and trauma hospitals. ICD-10 was adopted to categorize all types of falls (w00-w19). The results obtained were analyzed by SPSS 16.
RESULTS
Altogether 7,448 cases were included. The codes w18 (fall on same level) and w09 (fall involving playground equipment) with the frequencies of 1,856 and 1,303, respectively in both genders had the maximum number of falls. The maximum percentage of mortality has been related to "fall on and from ladder"," fall from cliff "and "fall on same level involving ice and snow".
CONCLUSION
As falls can cause irrecoverable injuries including mortality of people, thus health authorities and policymakers should take preventive measures given the causes of falls and the root of this type of injuries, so that the costs resulting from this cause and its injuries can be reduced.
Topics: Accidental Falls; Accidental Injuries; Adolescent; Adult; Aged; Cross-Sectional Studies; Female; Hospitalization; Humans; International Classification of Diseases; Iran; Male; Middle Aged; Retrospective Studies; Young Adult
PubMed: 33622588
DOI: 10.1016/j.cjtee.2021.01.001 -
International Journal of Environmental... Feb 2023Subway operation safety management has become increasingly important due to the severe consequences of accidents and interruptions. As the causative factors and... (Review)
Review
Subway operation safety management has become increasingly important due to the severe consequences of accidents and interruptions. As the causative factors and accidents exhibit a complex and dynamic interrelationship, the proposed subway operation accident causation network (SOACN) could represent the actual scenario in a better way. This study used the SOACN to explore subway operation safety risks and provide suggestions for promoting safety management. The SOACN model was built under 13 accident types, 29 causations and their 84 relationships based on the literature review, grounded theory and association rule analysis, respectively. Based on the network theory, topological features were obtained to showcase different roles of an accident or causation in the SOACN, including degree distribution, betweenness centrality, clustering coefficient, network diameter, and average path length. The SOACN exhibits both small-world network and scale-free features, implying that propagation in the SOACN is fast. Vulnerability evaluation was conducted under network efficiency, and its results indicated that safety management should focus more on fire accident and passenger falling off the rail. This study is beneficial for capturing the complex accident safety-risk-causation relationship in subway operations. It offers suggestions regarding safety-related decision optimization and measures for causation reduction and accident control with high efficiency.
Topics: Accidents; Algorithms; Cluster Analysis; Railroads; Safety Management
PubMed: 36834080
DOI: 10.3390/ijerph20043386 -
Accident; Analysis and Prevention Jun 2023Railway accident causation analysis is fundamental to understanding the nature of railway safety. Although a considerable number of prior studies have investigated this... (Review)
Review
Railway accident causation analysis is fundamental to understanding the nature of railway safety. Although a considerable number of prior studies have investigated this context, many of them suffer from the need to deal with a large amount of textual data given that most railway safety-related information is recorded and stored in the form of text. To gain a better understanding of the limitations imposed by overreliance on textual analysis, a scoping review of the academic literature on how railway accident causation analysis is addressed has been conducted. The results confirm the high frequency of using textual data, a single case study, and in-depth analysis frameworks. While the value of exploring causational factors is clear, the high level of human intervention and the labour-intensive analysis processes based on a large volume of textual data hinder researchers from understanding the complex nature of the rail safety system. Recently, growing attention has been given to the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to aid the practice of analysing a large corpus of textual data, but only limited studies to date in railway safety use such techniques and none address railway accident causation analysis. To fill this gap, a supplementary review is conducted to identify opportunities, challenges, boundaries and limitations in the application of NLP approaches to railway accident causation analysis. Findings indicate that novel techniques using off-the-shelf tools have strong potential to overcome the limitations of overreliance on manual analysis in practice and theory, but the absence of shared railway safety-related benchmark corpora restricts implementation. This study sheds light on a new approach to railway accident causation analysis and clarifies future applicable utilisations for further research.
Topics: Humans; Accidents, Traffic; Railroads; Causality; Records; Attention
PubMed: 36989961
DOI: 10.1016/j.aap.2023.107049 -
Lakartidningen Nov 2019In Sweden equestrian sport activities are the sixth most popular sport and predominantly women and girls are engaged. Horses are prey animals and humans are predators,... (Review)
Review
In Sweden equestrian sport activities are the sixth most popular sport and predominantly women and girls are engaged. Horses are prey animals and humans are predators, and the two species therefore act in completely different ways. It is well known that accidents can occur when horses and humans interact. Literature from different countries in the world reveals that most accidents happen to females and also children are at risk. The most common accident is when a rider falls from a horse, but also unmounted humans are at risk for injuries. Most of the injuries are uncomplicated, but there are several reports of serious injuries and death. Prevention of injuries is very important. Education about how horses behave and react in different situations and how to communicate with horses according to Natural Horsemanship strategies make the horses less inclined to escape. The effectiveness of helmets in preventing serious head injury has been well established.
Topics: Accident Prevention; Accidents; Adolescent; Adult; Animals; Athletic Injuries; Child; Horses; Humans; Protective Devices; Sweden; Wounds and Injuries; Young Adult
PubMed: 31742653
DOI: No ID Found