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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

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

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David P. Sklar, MD; Cameron Crandall, MD |
Emergency medicine has evolved from a location, with variably trained and experienced providers ("the ER"), to a discipline with a well-defined knowledge base and skill set that focus on the diagnosis and care of undifferentiated acute problems.(1) The importance of rapid diagnosis and treatment of serious conditions (e.g., myocardial infarction, stroke, trauma, and sepsis) has made timeliness not simply a determinant of patient satisfaction but also a significant safety and quality concern—delays in care can be deadly.(2) Emergency physicians (EPs) have identified delays caused by crowding from boarding of admitted patients as their most significant safety problem.(3) We present a model for understanding emergency department (ED) patient safety and identify solutions by deconstructing care into three realms: individual provider, patient, and environmental system (Table).
Pat Croskerry, MD, PhD, is a professor in emergency medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Trained as an experimental psychologist, Dr. Croskerry went on to become an emergency medicine physician, and found himself surprised by the relatively scant amount of attention given to cognitive errors. He has gone on to become one of the world's foremost experts in safety in emergency medicine and in diagnostic errors. We spoke to him about both.