The hospital survey on patient safety culture in Portuguese hospitals: instrument validity and reliability

Purpose – Quantitative instruments to assess patient safety culture have been developed recently and a few review articles have been published. Measuring safety culture enables healthcare managers and staff to improve safety behaviours and outcomes for patients and staff. The study aims to determine the AHRQ Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSPSC) Portuguese version's validity and reliability. Design/methodology/approach – A missing-value analysis and item analysis was performed to identify problematic items. Reliability analysis, inter-item correlations and inter-scale correlations were done to check internal consistency, composite scores. Inter-correlations were examined to assess construct validity. A confirmatory factor analysis was performed to investigate the observed data's fit to the dimensional structure proposed in the AHRQ HSPSC Portuguese version. To analyse differences between hospitals concerning composites scores, an ANOVA analysis and multiple comparisons were done. Findings – Eight of 12 dimensions had Cronbach's alphas higher than 0.7. The instrument as a whole achieved a high Cronbach's alpha (0.91). Inter-correlations showed that there is no dimension with redundant items, however dimension 10 increased its internal consistency when one item is removed. Originality/value – This study is the first to evaluate an American patient safety culture survey using Portuguese data. The survey has satisfactory reliability and construct validity.

Distributed MPC for Thermal Comfort and Load Allocation with Energy Auction

This paper presents a distributed predictive control methodology for indoor thermal comfort that optimizes the consumption of a limited shared energy resource using an integrated demand-side management approach that involves a power price auction and an appliance loads allocation scheme. The control objective for each subsystem (house or building) aims to minimize the energy cost while maintaining the indoor temperature inside comfort limits. In a distributed coordinated multi-agent ecosystem, each house or building control agent achieves its objectives while sharing, among them, the available energy through the introduction of particular coupling constraints in their underlying optimization problem. Coordination is maintained by a daily green energy auction bring in a demand-side management approach. Also the implemented distributed MPC algorithm is described and validated with simulation studies.

Establishment of optimal physical assets inspection frequency based on risk principles

Risk Based Inspection (RBI) is a risk methodology used as the basis for prioritizing and managing the efforts for an inspection program allowing the allocation of resources to provide a higher level of coverage on physical assets with higher risk. The main goal of RBI is to increase equipment availability while improving or maintaining the accepted level of risk. This paper presents the concept of risk, risk analysis and RBI methodology and shows an approach to determine the optimal inspection frequency for physical assets based on the potential risk and mainly on the quantification of the probability of failure. It makes use of some assumptions in a structured decision making process. The proposed methodology allows an optimization of inspection intervals deciding when the first inspection must be performed as well as the subsequent intervals of inspection. A demonstrative example is also presented to illustrate the application of the proposed methodology.