Crisis Management in Acute Care Settings: Human Factors, Team Psychology, and Patient Safety in a High Stakes Environment

Critical situations in acute and emergency care are one of the great clinical challenges. The nature of such care, involving uncertainty, high stakes, time pressure, and stress, makes this domain particularly vulnerable to errors in patient treatment. It has been increasingly acknowledged over the past decade that safe practice in these circumstances depends on a thorough understanding of the sources of human error.Crisis Management in Acute Care Settings is unique in providing a comprehensive outline of all the human factors issues relevant to patient safety during acute care. This newly revised edition has emerged from a long-standing cooperation between clinicians and psychologists, who have worked together again to enlarge and update each chapter. The strengths of the two professions have been blended into a readily accessible text which will help both physicians and non-physicians to better understand the principles of human behavior and decision making in critical situations and thus to avoid errors and provide safer treatment.