Promoting Patient Safety.

Leadership commitment is crucial to attaining sustainable improvement in patient safety. This “Declaration to Advance Patient Safety” call-to-action shares three steps to motivate work toward implementing change to enhance safe care. First, commit to a national plan for improvement. Second, identify and empower a senior leader and team to assess an organization’s existent safety status. Third, devise plans to measure, design, implement, and support adverse event reduction initiatives.

The 2015 National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) report Improving Diagnosis in Healthcare defined diagnostic error as “the failure to (a) establish an accurate and timely explanation of the patient's health problem(s) or (b) communicate that explanation to the patient.” This review and interviews with subject matter experts explored how the NASEM definition of diagnostic error has been operationalized in the literature. Of the sixteen included studies, only five operationalized the definition and only three studied communicating with the patient. The authors recommend formulating a set of common approaches to operationalize each of the three components of the NASEM definition. Patients and family should be included in defining the construct of “communication to the patient.”

In 2011, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) introduced a 16-hour shift limit for first-year residents. Recent studies found that these duty hour requirements did not yield significant differences in patient outcomes and the ACGME eliminated the shift limit for first-year residents in 2017. To assess the impact of work-hour limits on medical errors, this study prospectively followed two cohorts of resident physicians matched into US residency programs before (2002-2007) and after (2014-2016) the introduction of the work-hour limits. After adjustment for potential confounders, the work-hour limit was associated with decreased risk of resident-reported significant medical errors (32% risk reduction), reported preventable adverse events (34% risk reduction), and reported medical errors resulting in patient death (63% risk reduction).