Patient Safety : An Engineering Approach

Each year a vast sum of money is spent on health care around the globe and patient safety has become a serious global public health issue. Filled with up-to-date information, this book demonstrates how to handle patient safety-related problems by using methods developed in the area of engineering. It contains a chapter on mathematical concepts and another chapter on introductory material on safety and human factors considered essential to understand materials presented in subsequent chapters. The author’s presentation covers topics in such a manner that readers will require no previous knowledge to understand the concepts.

With unintended harm during hospital care costing billions of dollars to the world economy, not to mention millions of deaths each year, it’s no wonder the issue is equally front and center in the minds of healthcare providers and the public. Although the issue has been tackled in journal articles and conference proceedings, there are very few books on the topic. And none consider how methods and techniques developed in the area of engineering can handle safety and human error-related problems. Until now.

Written by an expert with vast know-how in engineering management, design, reliability, safety, and quality, Patient Safety: An Engineering Approach brings together the pertinent information scattered throughout books and journals, eliminating the need to consult many different and diverse sources to find what you need. B.S. Dhillon draws on his real-world experience to demonstrate how to handle patient safety-related problems using engineering techniques and backs this up with references for further reading at the end of each chapter. He sets the stage with introductory chapters on mathematical, patient safety, and human factors concepts essential to understanding materials presented in subsequent chapters.

Dhillon’s clear, concise discussion of the topics presents the information in such a way that no previous knowledge is required to understand the contents, yet he does not present it at a merely rudimentary level. He brings a fresh approach and engineering perspective to the issues, giving you a new tool kit for performing patient safety-related analysis, designing better medical systems/devices, and handling patient safety-related problems from an engineering perspective.