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Primers
Guides for key topics in patient safety through context, epidemiology, and relevant AHRQ PSNet content. The Patient Safety 101 Primer provides an overview of the patient safety field and covers key definitions and concepts.
Latest Primers
Elizabeth Seidel, MSW, Tara Cortes, PhD, RN, FAAN, and Cynthia Chong, MPA |
Anyone can find it challenging to understand medical terms, and millions of Americans have trouble understanding and acting upon health information. Health literate organizations make health... Read More
Deb Bakerjian, PhD, APRN, FAANP, FGSA, FAAN |
Anyone can find it challenging to understand medical terms, and millions of Americans have trouble understanding and acting upon health information. The mismatch between individuals' health literacy skills and the complexity... Read More
Irina Tokareva, RN, BSN, MAS, CPHQ and Patrick Romano, MD, MPH. |
Patient safety indicators are tools used to assess the frequency, severity, and impact of potential harms in health care, both within health care organizations and at the health care system, regional, and national levels.... Read More
Jennifer J. Edwards, MS, RN, CHSE; Amy Nichols, EdD, RN, CNS, CHSE, ANEF; and Deb Bakerjian, PhD, APRN, FAANP, FGSA, FAAN |
Simulation training has become a key component of the patient safety movement and healthcare professional education. Simulation is increasingly being used to improve clinical and teamwork skills in a variety of health care... Read More
All Primers (64)
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Clear and high-quality communication between all staff involved in caring for a patient is essential in order to achieve situational awareness. Breakdowns in communication are closely tied to preventable adverse events in hospitalized and ambulatory patients.
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Health care organizations use a variety of established and emerging methods to prospectively identify safety hazards before errors have occurred and to retrospectively analyze errors to prevent future harm.
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Medication errors can occur at any step along the pathway that begins when a clinician prescribes a medication and ends when the patient receives the medication. Adverse drug events—harm experienced by a patient as a result of exposure to a medication—are often the result of medication errors and are likely the most common source of preventable harm in both hospitalized and ambulatory patients. Preventing adverse drug events is a major priority for accrediting bodies and regulatory agencies.
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Medicine has traditionally treated errors as failings on the part of individual providers, reflecting inadequate knowledge or skill. The systems approach, by contrast, takes the view that most errors reflect predictable human failings in the context of poorly designed systems.
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Human factors engineering is the discipline that attempts to identify and address safety problems that arise due to the interaction between people, technology, and work environments.
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Few medical errors are as terrifying as those that involve patients who have undergone surgery on the wrong body part, undergone the incorrect procedure, or had a procedure intended for another patient. These "wrong-site, wrong-procedure, wrong-patient errors" (WSPEs) are rightly termed never events.
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Efforts to engage patients in safety efforts have focused on three areas: enlisting patients in detecting adverse events, empowering patients to ensure safe care, and emphasizing patient involvement as a means of improving the culture of safety.
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Long and unpredictable work hours have been a staple of medical training for centuries. However, little attention was paid to the patient safety effects of fatigue among residents until March 1984, when Libby Zion died due to a medication-prescribing error while under the care of residents in the midst of a 36-hour shift.
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The vast majority of health care takes place in the outpatient, or ambulatory, setting, and a growing body of research has identified and characterized factors that influence safety in office practice, the types of errors commonly encountered in ambulatory care, and potential strategies for improving ambulatory safety.
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Popular media often depicts physicians as brilliant, intimidating, and condescending in equal measures. This stereotype, though undoubtedly dramatic and even amusing, obscures the fact that disruptive and unprofessional behavior by clinicians poses a definite threat to patient safety.
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Though a seemingly simple intervention, checklists have played a leading role in the most significant successes of the patient safety movement, including the near-elimination of central line–associated bloodstream infections in many intensive care units.
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Patient safety event reporting systems are ubiquitous in hospitals and are a mainstay of efforts to detect safety and quality problems. However, while event reports may highlight specific safety concerns, they do not provide insights into the epidemiology of safety problems.
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Thousands of patients die every year due to diagnostic errors. While clinicians’ cognitive biases play a role in many diagnostic errors, underlying health care system problems also contribute to missed and delayed diagnoses.
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Being discharged from the hospital can be dangerous for patients. Nearly 20% of patients experience an adverse event in the first 3 weeks after discharge, including medication errors, health care–associated infections, and procedural complications.
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Initially developed to analyze industrial accidents, root cause analysis is now widely deployed as an error analysis tool in health care. A central tenet of RCA is to identify underlying problems that increase the likelihood of errors while avoiding the trap of focusing on mistakes by individuals.
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Discontinuity is an unfortunate but necessary reality of hospital care. No provider can stay in the hospital around the clock, creating the potential for errors when clinical information is transmitted incompletely or incorrectly between clinicians.
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Providing safe health care depends on highly trained individuals with disparate roles and responsibilities acting together in the best interests of the patient. The need for improved teamwork has led to the application of teamwork training principles, originally developed in aviation, to a variety of health care settings.
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Although long accepted by clinicians as an inevitable hazard of hospitalization, recent efforts demonstrate that relatively simple measures can prevent the majority of health care–associated infections. As a result, hospitals are under intense pressure to reduce the burden of these infections.
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Computerized provider order entry systems ensure standardized, legible, and complete orders, and—especially when paired with decision support systems—have the potential to sharply reduce medication prescribing errors.
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High-reliability organizations consistently minimize adverse events despite carrying out intrinsically hazardous work. Such organizations establish a culture of safety by maintaining a commitment to safety at all levels, from frontline providers to managers and executives.
