The goal of safety management is to monitor and enhance resilience. Developing the tools for Resilience Engineering and Management is a major research thrust and the work is beginning to be applied to aerospace, health care and process industries.

See the entry on the recent Symposium on Resilience Engineering.

Publications introducing concepts for Resilience Engineering include:
Woods, D. D. (in press). Creating Foresight: Lessons for Resilience from Columbia. In M. Farjoun and William Starbuck (eds.), Organization at the Limit: NASA and the Columbia Disaster. Blackwell.

E. S. Patterson, R.I. Cook and D.D. Woods. Gaps and Resilience. In M. S. Bogner (ed.) Human Error in Medicine, second edition. Erlbaum, in press.

Woods, D.D. (2005). Conflicts between Learning and Accountability in Patient Safety. DePaul Law Review. in press.

Patterson, E. S., Cook, R. I., Woods, D.D. and Render, M.L. (2004). Examining the Complexity Behind a Medication Error: Generic Patterns in Communication. IEEE SMC Part A, 34(6), 749-756.

R.I. Cook, M.L. Render and D.D. Woods. Gaps in the continuity of care and progress on patient safety. British Medical Journal, 320, 791—794, March 18, 2000.