Interventions for safer work systems

There have been a great many studies exploring a very wide range of approaches to improving the safety of medication use. In this chapter, we consider some examples of approaches to developing safer work systems; these are envisaged as being complementary to other solutions presented elsewhere in this book. The chapter is based around four of the five structural components of the work system described in the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety model (Carayon et al. 2006) presented in Chapter 11: people, tasks, tools and technology, and the environment. The fifth component, the organization, is outside the scope of this chapter.