Worldwide, more than 185,000 children under 18 years die from road traffic accidents annually (each four minutes a child death occurred due to road crashes); with most casualties from developing countries. 95% of road traffic fatalities among children occur in developing countries. Many more children are injured, often severely, and suffering from different disabilities. Road accidents cause ex...

Understanding and complying with the guidelines of the American Society of Anesthesiologists will help ensure high-quality patient care, increase levels of patient safety, and minimize medico-legal risk. The author discusses important standards and guidelines for the administration of general anesthesia and sedation/analgesia in the office-based setting and compares the requirements of the diff...

Globalization has engendered increased complexity in the modern society. This complexity penetrates almost every aspect of our life. In the context of food systems, globalized food supply chains have created greater challenges for assuring food safety, with myriad actors, who are economically, socially and culturally diverse, involved in the production and distribution processes. To manage such...

Background: Neurosurgery practice conflicts with many challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic; Including the lack of beds in intensive care units, as well as the use of some methods such as drills and trans-nasal and trans-oral approaches that produce aerosols or are directly in contact with patient discharge. Due to these challenges, developing a clinical guideline to help neurosurgeons and me...

The global burden of surgical disease is on the rise. In underserved areas this need is being increasingly met by surgical short-term medical missions (STMMs). However, access to safe surgical care is still of great concern to global health advocates. We sought to evaluate the current safety practices and outcomes of surgical care being provided by STMMs. We looked at 35 primary research papers...

In accession to the growing use and complexity of the software in safety critical automotive systems, the testing for its safety violation became more imperative. This necessitated the development of an automated parser tool for the software of the automotive system in order to ensure its safety. This tool is developed with intent to verify and validate whether the automobile system software wh...

Are medicines dangerous chemicals or life enhancing agents? The answer is ‘Both of those things, often at the same time, and worse in the wrong hands’. In this issue of the Annals, several authors address the problems besetting specialists who assess drug efficacy and safety. The last two articles describe activities (pharmacogenetics, and engineered drug delivery) which may produce unforeseen ...

Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software is increasingly being suggested for use in systems development, for reasons including cost, functionality, useability, testedness, availability of support and upgrades. At the same time, standards for use of software in safetyrelated systems are becoming increasingly stringent. This paper examines the issue of providing safety assurance for systems invol...