This white paper lays out some foundational information about different approaches to safety: how various industries differ in their approaches to safety engineering, and a comparison of three general approaches to safety (system safety, industrial safety engineering, and reliability engineering). An attempt is made to lay out the properties of industries and systems that make one approach more...

The goal of hyptensive anesthesia is the safe reduction of intraoperative blood loss, thus reducing transfusion risks.  Previous hypotensive technics had a narrow margin of safety in that cardiac output was usually reduced in proportion to the degree of induced hypotension. This is in contrast to the results of our study, in which Sodium Nitroprusside was used as the sole hypotensive agent. Ni...

The development of blood storage systems allowed donation and transfusion to be separated in time and space. This separation has permitted the regionalization of donor services with subsequent economies of scale and improvements in the quality and availability of blood products. However, the availability of storage raises the question of how long blood products can and should be stored and how ...

Safety case development is not a post-development activity, rather it should occur throughout the system development lifecycle. The key components in a safety case are safety arguments. Too often, safety arguments are constructed without proper reasoning. Inappropriate reasoning in safety arguments could undermine a system’s safety claims, which in turn contributes to safety-related failures of...