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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

Beyond the Pandemic: Creating Total Systems Safety
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
In Conversation with Kathleen Sanford and Sue Schuelke about Virtual Nursing
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

Virtual Nursing: Improving Patient Care and Meeting Workforce Challenges
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

Building Capacity for Patient Safety
Regina M. Hoffman, MBA, RN, Cindy Manaoat Van, MHSA, CPPS, Sarah E. Mossburg, RN, PhD |

This piece focuses on the importance of building the capacity of the workforce and organizations for patient safety using patient safety education.

All Perspectives (7)
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 Results
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    • Patient Safety During Hospital Discharge
    Katherine Liang and Eric Alper, MD |
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    • This piece explores the risks patients face after hospital discharge and strategies to address them, such as patient education, Project RED, and the Care Transitions Intervention.
    In Conversation With… Harlan Krumholz, MD, SM
    Dr. Krumholz is Professor of Medicine at the University of Yale School of Medicine and Director of the Yale-New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation. We spoke with him about readmissions and post-hospital syndrome, a term he coined in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine to describe the risk of adverse health events in recently hospitalized patients.
    Missed Nursing Care: A Key Measure for Patient Safety
    Jane Ball, PhD, and Peter Griffiths, PhD |
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    • This piece explores how missed nursing care may explain the association between low nurse staffing levels and increased mortality in hospital patients.
    In Conversation With… Linda Aiken, PhD, RN
    Dr. Aiken is Claire M. Fagin Leadership Professor of Nursing, Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at University of Pennsylvania. She is generally considered the nation's foremost expert on health policy as it relates to the nursing workforce. We spoke with her about how nurse staffing and the work environment can affect patient safety and outcomes.
    What Do We Know About Emergency Department Safety?
    David P. Sklar, MD; Cameron Crandall, MD |
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    • 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).
    In Conversation with…Pat Croskerry, MD, PhD
    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.
    The Role of Graduate Medical Education (GME) in Improving Patient Safety
    Arpana R. Vidyarthi, MD; Robert B. Baron, MD, MS |
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    • 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.(1) 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.
    In Conversation with…Thomas J. Nasca, MD
    Thomas J. Nasca, MD, is the executive director and chief executive officer of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). Prior to joining the ACGME in 2007, Dr. Nasca, a nephrologist, was dean of Jefferson Medical College and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs of Thomas Jefferson University. We asked him to speak with us about the role of the ACGME in patient safety.
    Care Transitions
    Sunil Kripalani, MD, MSc |
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    • Hospital discharge is often viewed as the end of an acute medical event. Goodbyes are said as patients pack their belongings and return home. Physicians scratch the patient's name off their rounding list, and hospital staff remove the patient from the census as they clean out the room...
    In Conversation with...Eric Coleman, MD, MPH
    Eric A. Coleman, MD, MPH, is Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado. Trained in both geriatrics and health services research, Dr. Coleman has emerged as one of the world's leading authorities on issues surrounding transitions of care, particularly between acute and postacute settings. His care model, the Care Transitions Intervention, is being adopted by leading health care organizations around the country. The Intervention has been associated with significant decreases in rehospitalization rates.
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