STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence

Business process improvement: Seven steps to operational excellence

INTRODUCTION Total Quality Management. Six Sigma. Eight Omega. ISO 9000. CMMI. BPMM. SCOR. The number of process improvement frameworks out there is staggering. Where does one begin? What should we believe? Is there a right way and a wrong way? To be sure, we should make a distinction between a framework and a methodology. While a framework provides a foundation typically designed to promote a ...

Safety culture and the 5 steps to safer surgery: an intervention study.

BACKGROUND Improvements in safety culture have been postulated as one of the mechanisms underlying the association between the introduction of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Surgical Safety Checklist with perioperative briefings and debriefings, and enhanced patient outcomes. The 5 Steps to Safer Surgery (5SSS) incorporates pre-list briefings, the three steps of the WHO Surgical Safety Che...

Promoting Excellence Through Culture and Heritage

Safety Culture

Safety paradoxes and safety culture

This paper deals with four safety paradoxes: (1) Safety is defined and measured more by its absence than its presence. (2) Defences, barriers and safeguards not only protect a system, they can also cause its catastrophic breakdown. (3) Many organisations seek to limit the variability of human action, primarily to minimise error, but it is this same variability – in the form of timely adjustment...