Email Updates
Perspectives
Our Perspectives on Safety section features expert viewpoints on current themes in patient safety, including interviews and written essays published monthly. Annual Perspectives highlight vital and emerging patient safety topics.
Latest Perspectives
Cheryl B. Jones, PhD, RN, FAAN |
Editor’s note: Cheryl B. Jones is a professor, director of the Hillman Scholars Program, and interim associate dean of the School of Nursing’s PhD program at the University of North Carolina at... Read More
Cheryl B. Jones, PhD, RN, FAAN; Zoe Sousane, BS; Sarah E. Mossburg, RN, PhD
|
This piece focuses on workplace violence trends in healthcare settings and strategies for creating a safer healthcare environment.
Patricia McGaffigan, MS, RN, CPPS; Cindy Manaoat Van, MHSA, CPPS; Sarah E. Mossburg, RN, PhD
|
This piece focuses on the importance of patient safety following the end of the public health emergency and how organizations can move beyond the pandemic.
Patricia McGaffigan, MS, RN, CPPS; Cindy Manaoat Van, MHSA, CPPS; Sarah E. Mossburg, RN, PhD
|
This piece focuses on the importance of patient safety following the end of the public health emergency and how organizations can move beyond the pandemic.
Kathleen Sanford DBA, RN, FAAN, FACHE; Sue Schuelke PhD, RN-BC, CNE, CCRN-K; Merton Lee, PharmD, PhD; Sarah E. Mossburg, RN, PhD
|
Editor’s note: Kathleen Sanford is the chief nursing officer and an executive vice president at CommonSpirit. Sue Schuelke is an assistant professor at the College of Nursing–Lincoln Division, University of Nebraska... Read More
Kathleen Sanford DBA, RN, FAAN, FACHE; Sue Schuelke PhD, RN-BC, CNE, CCRN-K; Merton Lee, PharmD, PhD; Sarah E. Mossburg, RN, PhD
|
This piece discusses virtual nursing, an approach to care that incorporates an advanced practice nurse into hospital-based patient care through telehealth. Virtual nursing increases patient safety and may enable expert nurses to... Read More
All Perspectives (8)
Perspective Type
Additional Filters
Approach to Improving Safety
Clinical Area
Error Types
Safety Target
Setting of Care
Target Audience
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 Results
Show: 20
Sort by: Newest first
Sudeep Hegde, PhD; Ann M. Bisantz, PhD; and Rollin J. Fairbanks, MD, MS |
Save to Library
Share
This piece explores the key role of emergency medical services in providing care to patients at their moment of greatest need, safety hazards in this field, and opportunities for improvement.
Anne Collins McLaughlin, PhD |
Save to Library
Share
The use of checklists is a primitive yet remarkably effective strategy for ensuring accuracy in complex tasks. Checklists have long been used in fields such as aviation and space exploration but have only recently made headway in medicine. The reluctance of medical professionals to adopt checklists is often framed as pushback against "more paperwork" and "cookbook medicine," or due to disbelief in their effectiveness. However, a rich literature has helped establish many best practices in checklist design, and health care now stands to benefit.
Peter J. Pronovost, MD, PhD, is a Professor of Anesthesia, Critical Care, and Health Policy at Johns Hopkins University and Director of the Johns Hopkins Quality and Safety Research Group. He may be best known for having led the Michigan Keystone project, which used checklists and other interventions to markedly reduce catheter-associated bloodstream infections in ICUs throughout the state. For this work and more, he received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and Time Magazine named him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. We asked him to speak with us about checklists and other thoughts about the science of improving patient safety.
Anita L. Tucker, DBA, MS |
Save to Library
Share
Frontline health care providers are challenged by poorly performing work systems. Required equipment is broken, patient medications are in the wrong dose, key information fails to get communicated, and essential supplies are out of stock.(
Michael S. Wolf, PhD, MPH; Stacy Cooper Bailey, MPH |
Save to Library
Share
Clear health communication is increasingly recognized as essential for promoting patient safety. Yet according to a recent Joint Commission report, What Did the Doctor Say? Improving Health Literacy to Protect Patient Safety, communication problems among health care providers, patients, and families are common and a leading root cause of adverse outcomes. Addressing health literacy—the capacity of individuals to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions—has become a primary objective for many health systems in order to protect patients from harm.
Dean Schillinger, MD, is a Professor of Medicine at University of California, San Francisco, Director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, and Chief of the California Diabetes Prevention and Control Program. His role as a practicing clinician at a safety net hospital (San Francisco General Hospital) has put him in a unique position to pursue influential and relevant research related to health literacy and improving care for vulnerable populations.
Jeffrey M. Rothschild, MD, MPH; Carol Keohane, RN, BSN |
Save to Library
Share
Medication safety in hospitals depends on the successful execution of a complex system of scores of individual tasks that can be categorized into five stages: ordering or prescribing, preparing, dispensing, transcribing, and monitoring the patient's response. Many of these tasks lend themselves to technologic tools. Over the past 20 years, technology has played an increasingly larger role toward achieving the five rights of medication safety: getting the right dose of the right drug to the right patient using the right route and at the right time. While several of these technologies may incur significant upfront and maintenance costs, the net impact over time may be reduced overall institutional costs and improvements in work efficiency. Examples of technologic tools commonly seen in many hospitals today include computerized provider order entry (CPOE) with decision support and automatic dispensing carts, also known as medication dispensing robots. While outside the scope of this Perspective, it is important to emphasize that many nontechnologic interventions, such as clinical pharmacists on physician rounds, can be equally effective in improving medication safety.
Eric G. Poon, MD, MPH, is Director of Clinical Informatics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Poon’s research has focused on using health information technology to improve patient safety. He oversees the development and implementation of clinical applications including computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and barcode-assisted electronic medication administration record, and was lead author on the first rigorous study demonstrating the impact of a bar coding system in a hospital pharmacy. We asked him to speak with us about how such technology can augment medication safety.
Jeffrey B. Cooper, PhD |
Save to Library
Share
My journey into patient safety began in 1972. It was born of serendipity enabled by the good fortune of extraordinary mentors, an environment that supported exploration and allowed for interdisciplinary teamwork, and my own intellectual curiosity. The...
Lucian Leape, MD, is generally known as the father of the modern patient safety movement in the United States. A Harvard professor, Leape shifted his career two decades ago from his clinical practice as a pediatric surgeon to a focus on understanding how medical errors occur and how patient safety can be improved. The result was several groundbreaking studies and commentaries that helped shift the paradigm from "bad people" to "bad systems," and which paved the way for the Institute of Medicine report, "To Err is Human," which he helped write. He has received dozens of honors, including the John M. Eisenberg patient safety award, the duPont Award for Excellence in Children's Health Care, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator's Award in Health Policy Research. He spoke to us about his remarkable career and his thoughts about the patient safety movement.
Rainu Kaushal, MD MPH; Sekhar Upadhyayula, MD; David M. Gaba, MD; Lucian L. Leape, MD |
Save to Library
Share
Over the last decade, surgical operations and interventional procedures have been performed increasingly in offices with the administration of office-based anesthesia (OBA).(1) Economic considerations and convenience have driven this increase. Schultz...
James B. Conway; Saul N. Weingart, MD, PhD |
Save to Library
Share
A decade ago, two tragic medical errors rocked one of the world’s great cancer hospitals, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in Boston, to its core. The errors led to considerable soul searching and, ultimately, a major change in institutional practices a...
