Trust-Level Risk Evaluation and Risk Control Guidance in the NHS East of England

In recent years, the healthcare sector has adopted the use of operational risk assessment tools to help understand the systems issues that lead to patient safety incidents. But although these problem-focused tools have improved the ability of healthcare organizations to identify hazards, they have not translated into measurable improvements in patient safety. One possible reason for this is a lack of support for the solution-focused process of risk control. This article describes a content analysis of the risk management strategies, policies, and procedures at all acute (i.e., hospital), mental health, and ambulance trusts (health service organizations) in the East of England area of the British National Health Service. The primary goal was to determine what organizational-level guidance exists to support risk control practice. A secondary goal was to examine the risk evaluation guidance provided by these trusts. With regard to risk control, we found an almost complete lack of useful guidance to promote good practice. With regard to risk evaluation, the trusts relied exclusively on risk matrices. A number of weaknesses were found in the use of this tool, especially related to the guidance for scoring an event's likelihood. We make a number of recommendations to address these concerns. The guidance assessed provides insufficient support for risk control and risk evaluation. This may present a significant barrier to the success of risk management approaches in improving patient safety. © 2013 Society for Risk Analysis.

Novel applications of BEM based Poisson level set approach

Accurate and efficient computation of the distance function d for a given domain is important for many areas of numerical modeling. Partial differential (e.g. HamiltonJacobi type) equation based distance function algorithms have desirable computational efficiency and accuracy. In this study, as an alternative, a Poisson equation based level set (distance function) is considered and solved using the meshless boundary element method (BEM). The application of this for shape topology analysis, including the medial axis for domain decomposition, geometric de-featuring and other aspects of numerical modeling is assessed. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Structuring technological information for technology roadmapping: Data mining approach

Most research on technology roadmapping has focused on its practical applications and the development of methods to enhance its operational process. Thus, despite a demand for well-supported, systematic information, little attention has been paid to how/which information can be utilised in technology roadmapping. Therefore, this paper aims at proposing a methodology to structure technological information in order to facilitate the process. To this end, eight methods are suggested to provide useful information for technology roadmapping: summary, information extraction, clustering, mapping, navigation, linking, indicators and comparison. This research identifies the characteristics of significant data that can potentially be used in roadmapping, and presents an approach to extracting important information from such raw data through various data mining techniques including text mining, multi-dimensional scaling and K-means clustering. In addition, this paper explains how this approach can be applied in each step of roadmapping. The proposed approach is applied to develop a roadmap of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology to illustrate the process practically. © 2013 © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

Generating Options for Active Risk Control (GO-ARC): introducing a novel technique.

BACKGROUND: After investing significant amounts of time and money in conducting formal risk assessments, such as root cause analysis (RCA) or failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), healthcare workers are left to their own devices in generating high-quality risk control options. They often experience difficulty in doing so, and tend toward an overreliance on administrative controls (the weakest category in the hierarchy of risk controls). This has important implications for patient safety and the cost effectiveness of risk management operations. This paper describes a before and after pilot study of the Generating Options for Active Risk Control (GO-ARC) technique, a novel tool to improve the quality of the risk control options generation process. OUTCOME MEASURES: The quantity, quality (using the three-tiered hierarchy of risk controls), variety, and novelty of risk controls generated. RESULTS: Use of the GO-ARC technique was associated with improvement on all measures. CONCLUSIONS: While this pilot study has some notable limitations, it appears that the GO-ARC technique improved the risk control options generation process. Further research is needed to confirm this finding. It is also important to note that improved risk control options are a necessary, but not sufficient, step toward the implementation of more robust risk controls.