SERIES ON INDUSTRIAL AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING – serie

Human reliability and error have become a very important issue in health care, owing to the vast number of associated deaths each year. For example, according to the findings of the Institute of Medicine in 1999, around 100000 Americans die each year because of human error. This makes human error in health care the eighth leading cause of deaths in the US. Moreover, the total annual national cost of the medical errors is estimated at between $17 billion and $37.6 billion.There are very few books on this subject, and none of them covers it at a significant depth. The need for a book presenting the basics of human reliability, human factors and comprehensive information on error in medical systems is essential. This book meets that need.

Creativity is playing an ever more important role in the success or failure of organizations in the global competitive economy. The field of engineering is no exception. The objective of this book is to satisfy this vital need, which has been covered very little elsewhere.The book, which assumes no prior knowledge, will be useful to many people including all kinds of professional engineers, engineering managers, graduate and senior undergraduate students of engineering, and researchers and instructors in engineering, psychology, and business administration. At the end of each chapter there are numerous problems to test readers' comprehension. The book also includes a comprehensive list of references directly or indirectly related to creativity in engineering.

Safety has become very important because each year a vast number of people die due to workplace and other accidents. For example, in the United States for the year 1996 as per the National Safety Council, there were 93,400 deaths and 20,700,000 disabling injuries due to workplace accidents, with a total loss of $121 billion. Today there are a large number of books available on safety, but to the best of the author's knowledge none covers both general and systems safety (i.e., at a significant depth) and application or specialized areas such as software safety, robot safety, health care safety, and maintenance safety. This book has been written to satisfy that vital need.