Teaching Intercultural Competence Using Critical Incident and Cultural Story Telling

Intercultural literacy is attached increasingly great importance in this interconnected world.People from diversified cultural backgrounds need to interact with each other for various purposes.Schools and organizations offer courses to improve people’s intercultural competence.This paper examines two effective techniques to teach intercultural competence in the classroom setting:critical incident activity and cultural story telling.These two strategies can help achieve the desired objectives of Michael Byram’s intercultural communication model.

German critical incident reporting system database of prehospital emergency medicine: Analysis of reported communication and medication errors between 2005–2015

BACKGROUND: Communication failure in prehospital emergency medicine can affect patient safety as it does in other areas of medicine as well. We analyzed the database of the critical incident reporting system for prehospital emergency medicine in Germany retrospectively regarding communication errors.METHODS: Experts of prehospital emergency medicine and risk management screened the database for verbal communication failure, non-verbal communication failure and missing communication at all.RESULTS: Between 2005 and 2015, 845 reports were analyzed, of which 247 reports were considered to be related to communication failure. An arbitrary classifi cation resulted in six different kinds: 1) no acknowledgement of a suggestion; 2) medication error; 3) miscommunication with dispatcher; 4) utterance heard/understood improperly; 5) missing information transfer between two persons; and 6) other communication failure.CONCLUSION: Communication defi cits can lead to critical incidents in prehospital emergency medicine and are a very important aspect in patient safety.

Analysis of Critical Incidents during Anesthesia in a Tertiary Hospital

Introduction: Critical incident monitoring is important in quality improvement as it identifies potential risks to patients by analyzing adverse events or near-misses. Methods: This study analyses the reported incidents in a tertiary hospital over a 4-year period. Results: A total of 441 incidents were reported out of 98,502 anesthetics performed during the study period. Of these incidents, 67 resulted in no harm caused, 116 with unanticipated ICU admissions and 20 mortalities. The odds of having a critical incident increased with ASA status: from an odds ratio of 2.08 (95% CI: 1.58 to 2.74) for ASA 2 patients compared to ASA1, to OR of 13.70 (5.91 to 31.74) in ASA 5 compared to ASA 1. Critical incidents also have higher odds occurring out of hours (OR 1.7 (1.45 to 2.23) compared to daytime hours (08:00-17:00). They occurred most commonly in maintenance phase (142, 32.7%), followed by induction (120, 27.6%). The most common types of incidents include airway and respiratory (110, 24.9%) followed by drug related incidents (67, 15.2%). Human error was attributed as a significant contributing factor in 276 incidents (61.5%) followed by patient factors in 112 incidents (25.4%). Mitigating factors such as vigilance by staff involved were significant in 136 incidents (30.3%). Conclusion: Higher ASA status appears to be the most important factor associated with actual or potential patient harm in our study. Also significant, was time of incident, with incidents more likely out of hours. Critical incident reporting is a valuable part of quality assurance. We should continue to invest in incident reporting, incident analysis and improvement plans.

INTELLIGENT SECURITY SYSTEMS ENGINEERING FOR MODELING FIRE CRITICAL INCIDENTS:TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE SECURITY

An intelligent security systems engineering approach is used to analyze fire and explosive critical incidents, a growing concern in urban communities. A feed-forward back-propagation neural network models the damages arising from these critical incidents. The overall goal is to promote fire safety and sustainable security. The intelligent security systems engineering prediction model uses a fully connected multilayer neural network, and considers a number of factors related to the fire or explosive incident including the type of property affected, the time of day, and the ignition source. The network was trained on a large number of critical incident records reported in Toronto, Canada between 2000 and 2006. Our intelligent security systems engineering approach can help emergency responders by improving cr^tical incident analysis, sustainable security, and fire risk management.

Reflection:A Critical Look at Escaping Secondary Traumatic Stress Experienced by Law Enforcement Officers

Despite the stigma that is associated with law enforcement officers receiving mental health resources and treatment to combat secondary traumatic stress,it is widely the most effective form for recovery and having a fulfilling career.Law enforcement officers are superheroes and,they are known for saving the day.That is why it is critical for mental health offerings to be normalized in law enforcement agencies and constant evaluation of the psychological and cognitive well-being of officers.Unfortunately,the stress of the profession will not go away,but having resources and incentives to address several factors that officers face will assist with their overall feeling about the important work they do.As such,it is recommended that law enforcement agencies adopt programs to treat secondary traumatic stress,such as Critical Incident Stress Debriefing,Peer-Support Program,and Crisis Intervention Team.While there is no perfect program,these programs are designed to reduce the risk of serious injury or death during an emergency interaction between citizens and law enforcement officers.Ultimately,it is the responsibility of those charged with protecting law enforcement officers to understand the stress and how it affects the mind and body of those officers in managing life,work,and citizens.

A Study on Internal Service Recovery Strategy Using CIT from the First Line Staff's Perspective

Service is a special product. It is intangible and unstored, so service er-rors are not avoided. Once service errors appear, the first line staffs who keep di-rect touch with customers wil play an important role in service recovery. The staffs＇ negative emotions during the recovery service should be recovered by internal ser-vice recovery. In this paper, critical incident technique is applied to analyse the re-covery strategies expected by the first line staff and the internal service recovery strategies such as inspiring, authorization, training and psychology service are put forward. the strategy most expected by the staff is reward.