Safety-related Content Research Articles

Analyzing consumer perceptions about food safety by applying the food-related lifestyle approach.

Food safety standards remain a major concern for consumers, especially in developing and emerging economies, due to gaps in the capacities of food safety enforcement institutions and limited investments from private sector actors. This study analyzes consumer behavior and food safety-related lifestyles in Kosovo, a post-communist emerging economy. Consumer groups were identified according to their food-related lifestyle using the classical 2-stage segmentation approach of factor analysis as well as cluster analysis. The study findings indicate that almost two-thirds of the surveyed consumers are fairly or very concerned about food safety. The results reveal that highly educated female consumers are more concerned about personal health risks, food safety-related content, and related diseases. This study provides interesting insights for food safety policymakers and the agroindustry on how to promote food safety consumer awareness effectively with targeted communication strategies.

Self-reported skills for ensuring patient safety and quality of care among Italian nursing students: a descriptive cross-sectional study

ABSTRACT Nursing students must face quality- and safety-related content early in the classroom and in clinical environments. This study investigated nursing students’ self-perceived quality and safety skills in Italy, using the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) framework. The research also identified whether student perception varied in relation to factors associated with the attended bachelor’s degree program and individual student variables (e.g. academic year, level of preparedness to perform nontechnical skills). A cross-sectional study was performed using a sample of 454 nursing students. The Quality and Safety Education for Nurse-Student Evaluation Survey (QSE-SES) tool and the instrument Non-Technical Skills-Student Evaluation (NTS-SE) were administered. The results revealed major confidence in patient-centered care skills, whereas nursing students perceived that they were unprepared for putting other QSEN skills into practice. Linear regression analysis revealed that age, the number of internship experiences, and the level of confidence in putting nontechnical skills into practice were positively associated with students’ preparedness in performing the QSEN skills. Moreover, our results showed that the QSEN-SES scores varied significantly according to the bachelor’s degree program. Faculties and clinical learning environments should work together to provide effective opportunities for nursing students to acquire quality and safety skills, and critical thinking. Adopting a conceptual framework could help nurse educators develop precise teaching strategies and evaluate students’ learning outcomes.

A Novel Deep Q-Learning-Based Air-Assisted Vehicular Caching Scheme for Safe Autonomous Driving

The safety driving-related content demands of vehicle users increase rapidly, especially with the development of autonomous driving. It is significantly necessary to obtain the safety-related transportation information of an area when vehicles are drove there, whether or not they are controlled by human being. However, vehicular content caching can bring issues in distributed-fashion, such as high response delay and low content response ratio because of the poor traffic condition and the obstructions of buildings. As a consequence, we adopt UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) to assist the driving safety-related content caching for vehicles. Besides, since the power energy and the caching storage of UAVs are limited, it is needed to design an optimal caching scheme to guarantee the driving safety-related content demands of vehicle users as well as reduce the energy consumption of UAVs. In this article, we propose a novel deep Q-learning based air-assisted vehicular caching scheme to respond to the driving safety-related content requests of vehicle users. First, a three-layered content response architecture is introduced, where an airship is leveraged to take charge of the scheduling of UAVs to improve the content response. Then, a multi-objective mathematical model is built to describe the specific problem of the proposed scheme. Finally, deep Q-learning is applied to solve the multi-objective problem by learning from the history content requests of vehicle users. Extensive experiments have been conducted which show the proposed scheme outperforms its counterparts in terms of content hit ratio, response delay, being scheduling probability and packet buffering time.

Improving Education and Training of Dutch Major Hazard Control Inspectors: A 15 Years Longitudinal Case Study.

The education and training program for inspectors of Major Accident Hazard Establishments, specifically the EC Seveso III directive implicated Dutch chemical companies, changed considerably over a fifteen year period. This longitudinal, time-series cross sectional case study describes the development of the education and training program for Major Hazard Control inspectors, acting as regulators from the Labour inspectorate, belonging to the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment. A blueprint had to be constructed in order to assess the development and quality of this program in four cross sections over time. The description highlights both the safety related content and the regulator skills parts of the program in its changing context. Professional standards, educational objectives, quality of education, evaluation method, education change process and the response to the dynamic operational environment were examined. The main findings are that the education and training program kept the same main structure over the time period while its contents were adapted to respond to external context changes. Internal evaluation of performance data and education style led to a shift in contents from theoretical knowledge towards safety management and inspection practice oriented experience related knowledge. An active teaching style, increased usage of professional standards and more systematic evaluation, starting from the blue print in this study, offer the best opportunities for further improvement. Current insights on regulatory performance lead to a recommended future perspective for the inspectors’ role to be translated into education and training: balancing empathy, inquisitiveness and support with control and enforcement, or rather: exert tough love, staying between too soft and too hard.

Component Ageing and Life Management Database Design for Multi-Nuclear-Power-Plant

According to the requirement of the nuclear power plant ageing management, combined with the nuclear safety guide HAD103/12 “nuclear power plant ageing management" released by NNSA (national nuclear safety administration), this paper introduces the applicable to multiple power plant equipment ageing and life management of the database design requirements, the development process, general structure, composition and function, application scope, maintenance and safety related content.

Pedestrian and bicycle plans and the incidence of crash-related injuries

This study examined the association between the presence of pedestrian and bicycle plans to pedestrian and bicyclist nonfatal and fatal injuries from 1997 to 2009 among 553 North Carolina (NC) municipalities. We considered all municipal plans (n=92; 49 pedestrian; 34 bicycle; and 9 combined plans featuring pedestrian and bicyclist components) published through 2009. Counts of pedestrian and bicyclist nonfatal and fatal injuries came from the NC Department of Transportation crash database, and the estimated number of pedestrian and bicycle trips per municipality in one year were used to calculate pedestrian and bicyclist nonfatal and fatal injury rates. In the 13-year study period, pedestrian/combined municipality plans and bicycle/combined municipality plans were present for 189 (2.6%) and 238 (3.3%) municipality-years, respectively. There were 11,795 nonfatal injuries, 9237 possible nonfatal injuries, and 1075 fatal injuries sustained by pedestrians in pedestrian–motor vehicle crashes. There were 4842 nonfatal injuries, 3666 possible nonfatal injuries, and 134 fatal injuries sustained by bicyclists in bicyclist–motor vehicle crashes. Although not statistically significant, unadjusted nonfatal and fatal injury rates among pedestrians and bicyclists were lower in those municipality-years in which plans had been published that year or in a year prior, compared to municipality-years lacking a plan. Adjusted rate ratios (RR) indicated that pedestrian nonfatal and fatal injury rates decreased in municipality-years with publication of pedestrian/combined plans (nonfatal injury RR: 0.75, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.68, 0.82; fatal injury RR: 0.63, 95% CI: 0.46, 0.85). However, bicyclist nonfatal and fatal injury rates did not significantly change with publication of bicyclist/combined plans. Our research suggests that plan publication is associated with lower rates of nonfatal and fatal injury in pedestrians; this association was not observed for bicyclists. Further work must determine how the extent of implementation and quality of safety-related content within these plans affects changes in nonfatal and fatal injury rates.

Safety science meets basic science in problem-based learning

Context and setting Medical educators are continually challenged to add new topics to the curriculum. Calls for teaching about medical error and the science of improving patient safety come from multiple accrediting and credentialing bodies, as well as patient advocacy groups. Medical educators are faced with the challenge of how and where to begin teaching the scope of the issue, the necessary vocabulary and the ‘basic science’ of system improvement amidst an overcrowded curriculum. The second year of basic science at the College of Human Medicine, Michigan State University is delivered using a problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum. Organised in 10 organ or system domains, patient cases integrate basic science content and are supplemented by references, stimulus questions, and some lectures and laboratory sessions. Why the idea was necessary There is consensus that the teaching and assessment of medical error and patient safety knowledge, skills and attitudes should begin as early as possible so that learners are ready to apply these principles to their clinical experiences. Licensing organisations are adding questions on these topics to their examinations. The patient cases in our PBL curriculum have already provided the context for ethics, evidence-based medicine and other topics, the content of which is relevant to multiple PBL domains. Using these cases to provide context for medical error and patient safety-related content seemed logical. What was done Since 2008, the Cardiovascular Domain Curriculum Development Group (CDG) has added foundational material on medical error and patient safety science to several patient cases. An introductory lecture in the first week of the domain covered the scope of the issue, basic principles of error genesis, failure mode effect analysis, human factor engineering and root cause analysis (RCA). A pre-test of 10 multiple-choice questions preceded the lecture. Hospital patient safety goals (relating to communication error, medication reconciliation, health care-associated infection) guided the interpolation of medical errors into the existing cases. One ‘patient’ died as a result of a hand-off error. Stimulus questions for small-group discussion were added to cases with error and references were provided for independent study. On the last day of the domain, small groups watched a mock RCA. Five of the pre-test questions were placed on the final domain examination. Evaluation of results and impact Overall performance on the domain examination did not differ from that in previous years. For the five questions that appeared in both the pre-test and the domain examination, the mean student score was 50% in the pre-test and 79% in the domain examination. Mean student rating of the lecture was 3.6/5.0. Subsequently, a Year 3 student commented: ‘At the time I was not sure why we were learning this. We did an RCA on one of my patients this [clerkship] year … I knew what they were talking about and why it was done.’ One faculty member commented: ‘Thanks for adding this important material.’ The addition of foundational medical error and patient safety material to a PBL domain placed this material into a patient context, in which it was well received. Students demonstrated improvement in their knowledge base. Results were presented to our curriculum committee and a decision was made to add medical error and patient safety material to cases in every one of the PBL domains.