In a federal report released Wednesday, Labor Department officials announced that workplace fatalities have dropped to their lowest level since the agency began tracking such statistics. Officials attributed the drop to increased outreach by Occupational Safety and Health Administration. However, union officials were quick to note that the overall drop may have been caused by a decline in workplace transportation deaths – an area not regulated by OSHA – and to point out several fatal construction and industrial accidents.  Dan Frosch, The New York Times  08/20/2008
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The Salt Lake Tribune reports that the so-called “never events,” the most serious types of medical errors, occurred at least once every six days in Utah hospitals during 2007. Among the 57 serious medical errors, also referred to as sentinel events, 27 resulted in fatalities.
Utah started tracking never events, also called sentinel events, in 2001, after a landmark study by the Institute of Medicine titled “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System.” The IOM estimates medical errors may cause 98,000 deaths a year. 
Heather May, The Salt Lake …

In my daily business I am faced with this huge elephant called HIPPA.  Most people have no idea what it is really all about.  It stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.  It was initially intended to make it easier for a patient to obtain continuity of care between providers.  Most of the staff I come into contact with think that it is only a privacy act. 
 
The DesMoines Register had a story recently that indicated the “privacy” is most definately missing from HIPPA.  In one case, a local newspaper …

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling will make it more difficult and more expensive for employers to win age discrimination lawsuits.
 
In recent years, Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory has been charged with designing prototype naval nuclear reactors and with training Navy personnel to run them. The demands for naval nuclear reactors changed with the end of the Cold War, however, and for fiscal year 1996 Knolls was ordered by the federal government to reduce its work force.
 
Knolls had its managers score their subordinate employees on “performance,” “flexibility,” and “critical …