Import New Knowledge and Skills

Imagine that it s a busy day, and you shrink San Francisco Airport to only one short runway and one ramp and gate. Make planes take off and land at the same time, at half the present time interval, rock the runway from side to side, and require that everyone who leaves in the morning returns that same day. Then turn off the radar to avoid detection, impose strict controls on radios, fuel the aircraft in place with their engines running. Now wet the whole thing down with salt water and oil, and man it with 20-year-olds, half of whom have never seen an airplane close up. 

These are the conditions of aircraft carriers. Danger and risk are 

Health care has much in common with other high-risk industries. High-reliabUity applications from nonmedical high-risk domains (such as aviation, aerospace, and nuclear power) can be adapted to advance safety in health care. 

Health care and its high-risk counterparts are large-scale complex systems in which decisions are made with less than perfect information, in stressful conditions that are full of imcertainty. To add to these challenges, large-scale complex systems have specific organizational characteristics that challenge the pursuit of safety (Grabowski and Roberts, 1997)  

Although health care shares characteristics with other large-scale complex systems, there are differences that challenge high-reliability performance. Roberts (1999) has studied HROs and found several characteristics that define high reliability. 

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Chapter Five, Import New Knowledge and Skills, translates concepts from safety science and lessons from high-reliability organizations into practical applications for health care. 

Throughout this course, your instructor will very likely have specialized software available on computers and will offer help in their application. It is important for your education and career that you become widely knowledgeable and skilled in the use of the computer and software. It will be a tool that you will continue to use at the home and office. Many new terms will be introduced in this experiment. All words in bold print are defined in a glossary at the end of the experiment. 

This chapter will reacquaint you with the science of chemistry. You will revisit important concepts and skills from previous grades. You will also prepare to extend your knowledge and skills in new directions. 

Numerically controlled machine tools are more complex than before. When the knowledge and skills of the operators cannot keep up with the new requironents, the potentiality of operational errors increases. Often not even the importer of the machine is sufficiently well acquainted with the construction and properties of it. 

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