Health and Safety Policy

Effective management of employee safety and health is crucial to reducing the number, severity, and cost of workplace injuries and illnesses. Yet less than half of today's 420,000 midsize industrial companies have any safety and health program in place for their personnel. What's more, many companies that attempt to establish safety programs don't come close to meeting proposed government standards, which will soon become the law. A widely respected safety and health consultant, Milton Terrell provides you with the step-by-step guidance you need to develop a complete and effective safety and health program - one that will enable you to comply with imminent federal legislation. Terrell's Safety and Health Management in the Nineties accomplishes this by drawing from the comprehensive guidelines set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's Voluntary Protection Program. It's the only book on the market today that uses this model and translates its formal provisions into clear, concise information you can readily use. With the help of the book's practical worksheets and other visual aids, you'll soon be able to communicate your safety and health policy and set program objectives; engage workers, managers, and executives in the safety and health process; create distinct lines of responsibility for safety among company personnel; compile an inventory of potential workplace hazards and identify gaps in the safety and health program; devise a hierarchy of management systems to prevent and control hazards; develop an occupational health delivery system tailored to meet the specific needs of your company; and establish ongoing safety and health training to help workers understandhazards and protect against them.

According to a recent Institute of Medicine report, as many as 98,000 Americans die each year as a result of medical error--a figure higher than deaths from automobile accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS. That astounding number of fatalities does not include the number of those serious mistakes that are grievous and damaging but not fatal. Who can forget the tragic case of 17-year-old Jesica Santillan, who died after receiving a heart-lung transplant with an incompatible blood type? What can be done about this? What should be done? How can patients and their families regain a sense of trust in the hospitals and clinicians that care for them? Where do we even begin the discussion? Accountability: Patient Safety and Policy Reform brings the issue to the table in response to the demand for patient safety and increased accountability regarding medical errors. In an interdisciplinary approach, Virginia Sharpe draws together the insights of patients and families who have suffered harm, institutional leaders galvanized to reform by tragic events in their own hospitals, philosophers, historians, and legal theorists. Many errors can be traced to flaws in complex systems of health care delivery, not flaws in individual performance. How then should we structure responsibility for medical mistakes so that justice for the injured can be achieved alongside the collection of information that can improve systems and prevent future error? Bringing together authoritative voices of family members, health care providers, and scholars--from such disciplines as medical history, economics, health policy, law, philosophy, and theology--this book examines how conventional structures of accountability in law andmedical structure (structures paradoxically at odds with justice and safety) should be replaced by more ethically informed federal, state, and institutional policies.