Written for instructors, dive team captains, surface teams, and underwater personnel alike, this book offers definitive information on procedures for safe operations, proper methods of training, and how to make appropriate purchasing decisions. Various techniques and types of equipment are discussed and assessed. Included also are chapters on methods of search in black water, swift water, and contaminated water, as well as techniques for evidence recovery.
As most public safety professionals are aware, the events that require emergency response personnell also frequently attract members of the news media. With this in mind, Media Relations for Public Safety Professionals provides a primer for emergency responders who find themselves confronted by the media.
Police officers, firefighters, and other public safety workers face exceptionally high rates of injury and fatality relative to the general workforce. This document provides an analysis of the risk factors associated with different aspects of public safety occupations, to help policymakers in their efforts to improve the health and safety of these employees.
Experts estimate that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. That's more than die from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDSâ€"three causes that receive far more public attention. Indeed, more people die annually from medication errors than from workplace injuries. Add the financial cost to the human tragedy, and medical error easily rises to the top ranks of urgent, widespread public problems. To Err Is Human breaks the silence that has surrounded medical errors and their consequenceâ€"but not by pointing fingers at caring health care professionals who make honest mistakes. After all, to err is human. Instead, this book sets forth a national agendaâ€"with state and local implicationsâ€"for reducing medical errors and improving patient safety through the design of a safer health system. This volume reveals the often startling statistics of medical error and the disparity between the incidence of error and public perception of it, given many patients' expectations that the medical profession always performs perfectly. A careful examination is made of how the surrounding forces of legislation, regulation, and market activity influence the quality of care provided by health care organizations and then looks at their handling of medical mistakes. Using a detailed case study, the book reviews the current understanding of why these mistakes happen. A key theme is that legitimate liability concerns discourage reporting of errorsâ€"which begs the question, "How can we learn from our mistakes?" Balancing regulatory versus market-based initiatives and public versus private efforts, the Institute of Medicine presents wide-ranging recommendations for improving patient safety, in the areas of leadership, improved data collection and analysis, and development of effective systems at the level of direct patient care. To Err Is Human asserts that the problem is not bad people in health careâ€"it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer. Comprehensive and straightforward, this book offers a clear prescription for raising the level of patient safety in American health care. It also explains how patients themselves can influence the quality of care that they receive once they check into the hospital. This book will be vitally important to federal, state, and local health policy makers and regulators, health professional licensing officials, hospital administrators, medical educators and students, health caregivers, health journalists, patient advocatesâ€"as well as patients themselves. First in a series of publications from the Quality of Health Care in America, a project initiated by the Institute of Medicine
Every Officer is a Leader: Transforming Leadership in Police, Justice, and Public Safety, authored by leadership expert Terry Anderson and several well known leaders in the law enforcement and criminal justice profession, responds to the need for a comprehensive leadership development model for the education and training of police, justice and public safety supervisors, managers and front line officers. He examines how leadership development has a profound impact on the morale and performance of individual officers, teams, and organizations, illustrating in depth and detail how police and other justice and public safety leaders (in corrections, fire, customs, immigration, security, courts, etc.) can implement the Transforming Leadership process, skills, and principles. The recent focus (during the past 10 years) on community policing initiatives has made competency based leadership skills training essential for front line officers. The author's innovative contribution is a focus on the necessity to build "a leadership organization" before - and to an extent, while - you move ahead into building a "learning organization" that is responsive to community and internal organizational needs. The personal, team, and organization development skills discussed in this book are necessary pre-requisites to successful implementation of any neighborhood or community policing initiatives. Every Officer is a Leader: Transforming Leadership in Police, Justice, and Public Safety provides a model for integrating other models into a holistic leadership development framework. It furnishes a map for developing critical leadership skills with self-assessment, includes the developmental aspects of leadership expert Terry Anderson's previous book on Transforming Leadership, and applies them to law enforcement and criminal justice. Anderson and his contributing authors add clarity, perspective, and examples to show how individual leaders can develop themselves, and one another, into high-performance team leaders and officers who motivate others to respond to issues that affect the morale, health, and safety of the communities in which they serve. This new focus adds a perspective on security issues that affect police, justice and public safety organizations.
Much of today's political rhetoric decries the welfare state and our maze of government regulations. Critics hark back to a time before the state intervened so directly in citizens' lives. In The People's Welfare, William Novak refutes this vision of a stateless past by documenting America's long history of government regulation in the areas of public safety, political economy, public property, morality, and public health. Challenging the myth of American individualism, Novak recovers a distinctive nineteenth-century commitment to shared obligations and public duties in a well-regulated society. Novak explores the by-laws, ordinances, statutes, and common law restrictions that regulated almost every aspect of America's society and economy, including fire regulations, inspection and licensing rules, fair marketplace laws, the moral policing of prostitution and drunkenness, and health and sanitary codes. Based on a reading of more than one thousand court cases in addition to the leading legal and political texts of the nineteenth century, The People's Welfare demonstrates the deep roots of regulation in America and offers a startling reinterpretation of the history of American governance.
