Posted by Luigi Fort, Senior Marketing Executive – Human Factors and Aviation

With the number of Ashgate books sold at the Risky Business 2010 Conference (Kings Place, London 18-19 November 2010) up by over 20%, Ashgate Publishing is establishing itself as a key publisher for healthcare and patient safety sector. Visitors seem to appreciate the significance of non-techncial skills as an aid to performance and service. This is reflected in the book sales with both Safety at the Sharp End and Safer Surgery doing extremely well. The Human Contribution, The Field Guide Understanding Human Error and The ETTO Principle: Efficiency-Thoroughness Trade-Off proved top-sellers too.

The top five:

Safety at the Sharp End: A Guide to Non-Technical Skills   Rhona Flin, University of Aberdeen, UK, Paul O’Connor, USA and Margaret Crichton, People Factor Consultants Ltd, UK

The Human Contribution: Unsafe Acts, Accidents and Heroic Recoveries   James Reason, Professor Emeritus, The University of Manchester, UK

The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error   Sidney Dekker, Lund University, Sweden

The ETTO Principle: Efficiency-Thoroughness Trade-Off: Why Things That Go Right Sometimes Go Wrong   Erik Hollnagel, MINES ParisTech, France

Safer Surgery: Analysing Behaviour in the Operating Theatre   Edited by Rhona Flin, University of Aberdeen, UK and Lucy Mitchell, University of Aberdeen, UK

Guy Loft, Ashgate’s Senior Commissioning Editor for Human Factors, will be attending the 1st Nordic Patient Safety Conference, which is taking place in Stockholm, 20-21 May 2010.

If you will be there, do visit the Ashgate stand, to say hello and to browse through a selection of our books.

From the conference website:

Patient Safety Challenges is the theme for this Nordic Conference arranged by KTH. The aim of the conference is to inspire safety work within the health-care sector by presenting current safety research from a systems perspective. Leading and internationally renowned researchers, with experience from the health-care sector and other areas with high safety demands, will participate.

Exchange of information on patient safety issues, is another important aim of the conference. Rapid technological development, and changes in the health-care organizations under economical pressure, creates new risks in the medical sector. These risks need to be handled at all levels of the health-care system. Therefore, this conference is geared towards politicians and decision makers within the health-care sector, as well as representatives from academia in the Nordic Region.

A recent House of Commons Health Committee recent ‘Patient Safety’ Report calls for improved undergraduate training in non-technical skills.

‘The NHS lags unacceptably behind other safety-critical industries such as aviation, in recognising the importance of effective teamworking and other non-technical skills.’

‘Patient safety must be fully and explicitly integrated into the education and training curricula of all healthcare workers. In addition, there must be more interdisciplinary training: those who work together should train together.’

In this context the new book Safer Surgery, edited by Rhona Flin and Lucy Mitchell, could not be more pertinent. It collates research by psychologists, surgeons and anaesthetists into how medical professionals work with each other in the operating theatre.  With a focus on observing and measuring the behaviour of operating team members, Safer Surgery explains methods and options for training in non-technical skills in the operating theatre environment.

This week (21-27 September) is Patient Safety First week – for more information visit the Patient Safety First website.

Ashgate will be attending the Risky Business 2009 Conference (17-18 September 2009, London). This will be the 8th Risky Business Conference in an international series of conferences focusing on patient safety, applying lessons from other safety critical industries. The first was held at The Royal College of Surgeons in London in November 2006. Since then there have been Risky Business Conferences held in Boston, Phoenix, Geneva and London.