The organizational context of human factors engineering

Human factors engineering concerns the design of equipment in accordance with the mental and physical characteristics of operators. Human factors engineers advise design engineers, but the organizational context limits their influence and restricts their perspective. The discussion of organizational context in this paper explains why military and industrial top management personnel are indifferent to good human factors design and shows how the social structure favors the choice of technologies that centralize authority and deskill operators and how it encourages unwarranted attributions of operator error. The role of equipment and system design in shaping cognitive maps and mental models is explored, and the technology-social structure paradigm is questioned.     

The role of the family in development

It is important for the development planner to view the family as a flexible organizational unit of individuals who have different roles, privileges, rewards, options, and obligations. In developing countries the criteria for distributing resources and responsibilities within families are not the same as the Western criteria of development needs and requirements. Neither do sex and age, particularly among the poor, determine the roles people play in the family. Women play important productive roles in developing countries and a critical role in the cultivation of all crops, subsistence and cash, in sub-Saharan Africa. Children also make important contributions. Although all family members must work hard, scarce resources and immediate needs frequently result in unequal distribution of resources and access to services. All members of low-income families in developing countries are involved in the struggle for survival, for no 1 income source is adequate. The family's decision-making process is implicit in all its distribution of both responsibilities and resources. If wives in poor households are able to retain control of their earnings, they can have more power. In sub-Saharan Africa, where the women have a major agricultural role, their power bases are broader.     

Nurse shortage or nursing shortage: have we missed the real problem?

Many strategies have been used to solve the nurse shortage. The shortage of nurses has in many ways alerted us to the need to provide safe and efficient care using the latest technology. Nursing needs to adopt, refine, and use this technology so the impact of the nursing shortage is just another statistic and not a disruptive and costly threat to the public.