Safer anaesthetic rooms: Human factors/ergonomics analysis of work practices.

The aim of this study was to analyse the design of anaesthetic rooms using human factors and ergonomics (HFE) methods. The methods used were hierarchical task analysis, link analysis and anthropometry. The study found several latent design errors which negatively affected drug and patient preparation tasks. Recommendations include anaesthetic room layout design modifications and system level changes. HFE principles provide generic recommendations but specific design details may not be generalizable. Further research is needed to explore the implementation of system changes.

Modeling of metal binding in tropical Fluvisols and Acrisols treated with biosolids and wastewater.

There is growing concern about the accumulation of metals in tropical agricultural soils. In this study, experimental results from batch studies were used to test whether multi-surface geochemical models could describe metal binding in selected Vietnamese soils. The multi-surface models considered metal binding to iron hydroxides (using the diffuse layer model), organic matter (Stockholm Humic model and NICA-Donnan model), and phyllosilicate clay (Gaines-Thomas equation) as well as complexation to dissolved organic and inorganic ligands in the solution phase. We found that for total dissolved Cd, Cu and Zn the two multi-surface models being tested provided very good model fits for all soils, as evidenced by low root-mean square errors between model predictions and observations. These results suggest that organic matter is an important sorbent for many metals in these soils. However, poor fits were obtained for Cr(III), Mn and Pb for all soils. The study also suggests that the pH is the main factor that controls the solubility of metals in tropical Fluvisols and Acrisols subjected to application of biosolids and wastewater, and that advanced multi-surface models can be used to simulate the binding and release of many trace metals.