Measuring Safety Culture: Qualitative and Quantitative Means of Measuring Safety Culture for Safety Management System Optimization

The Department of Transportation Office of the Inspector General (2020) investigated the Federal Aviation Administration oversight of Southwest Airlines Safety Management System and noted concerns and gaps in the oversight, specifically with the lack of guidance provided to inspectors in evaluating organizational safety culture. Using the published report as a case study, this work researched different peer-reviewed articles using qualitative and quantitative means to investigate the benefits, limitations, and assumptions of measuring an organizational safety culture. While different methods were used, academia seems to have settled on definitions for safety culture and safety climate with the majority of researchers using survey instruments to collect data. However, commercially available safety culture evaluations seem to use consultant experience instead of academic findings for curriculum and evaluation development. The Federal Aviation Administration could facilitate academic and commercial collaboration to improve guidance to inspectors and resolve gaps in oversight of safety culture in Safety Management Systems

Configuration Management Challenges of Model Based Systems Engineering on Multiple Variant Aircraft Fleets

Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) is moving from traditional Systems Engineering (SE), focusing on managing documentation, to Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), focusing on a system model (All Partners Access Network, n.d.). As NAVAIR transitions to an MBSE standard, controlling the Configuration Management (CM) of a fleet of a single series of aircraft in varying states of engineering change incorporations will be critical. Traditional systems engineering and configuration management are both text document focused disciplines that have existed since the end of World War II. The method chosen to conduct the research was by performing a case study on MBSE as related to configuration management challenges with different aircraft variants as the SE methodology transforms from document based to model based at NAVAIR

Applying Lessons from Safety-II Proof of Concept in Line Operational Safety Audit to Aviation Maintenance

Maintenance safety culture is a topic that continues to arise. There is much information in many different literature sources that discusses measuring, analyzing, and scrutinizing data to determine if a safety culture exists in an organization and how to improve it. Currently, aviation maintenance personnel are surveyed for their opinions on how safe their culture is. However, this may not be an adequate reflection of the safety culture or help maintenance personnel conduct their jobs. Typically, they are operating in an environment that has a central determination of what safety culture is. Other programs in other fields have attempted a decentralization of control to guide employees to adapt to variation in the environment and safely achieve their job requirements. A proof of concept is being tried in the commercial airline industry with university support. The results could be expanded beyond the flight deck and into aviation maintenance with further research into how Safety-II has been successfully applied to other industries

GUIDELINES FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF HAEMODYNAMICALLY STABLE PATIENTS WITH STAB WOUNDS TO THE ANTERIOR ABDOMEN

Clinical practice guidelines have been shown to improve the delivery of care. Anterior abdominal stab wounds, although uncommon, pose a challenge in both rural and urban trauma care. A multidisciplinary working party was established to assist in the development of evidence-based guidelines to answer three key clinical questions: (i) What is the ideal prehospital management of anterior abdominal stab wounds? (ii) What is the ideal management of anterior abdominal stab wounds in a rural or urban hospital without an on-call surgeon? (iii) What is the ideal emergency management of stable patients with anterior abdominal stab wounds when surgical service is available? A systematic review, using Cochrane method, was undertaken. The data were graded by level of evidence as outlined by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council. Stable patients with anterior abdominal stab wounds should be transported to the hospital without delay. Any interventions deemed necessary in prehospital care should be undertaken en route to hospital. In rural hospitals with no on-call surgeon, local wound exploration (LWE) may be undertaken by a general practitioner if confident in this procedure. Otherwise or in the presence of obvious fascial penetration, such as evisceration, the patient should be transferred to the nearest main trauma service for further management. In urban hospitals the patient with omental or bowel evisceration or generalized peritonitis should undergo urgent exploratory laparotomy. Stable patients may be screened using LWE. Abdominal computed tomography scan and plain radiographs are not indicated. Obese and/or uncooperative patients require a general anaesthetic for laparoscopy. If there is fascial penetration on LWE or peritoneal penetration on laparoscopy, then an urgent laparotomy should be undertaken. The developed evidence-based guidelines for stable patients with anterior abdominal stab wounds may help minimize unnecessary diagnostic tests and non-therapeutic laparotomy rates