Well-designed workspaces minimize disruptions and distractions. This review and study describes several important ways to improve the anesthesia workspace in the operating room. Recommendations include demarcating an anesthesia zone with adequate space for equipment and storage and that restricts unnecessary staff travel into and through the zone. Each recommendation includes an illustrative diagram, explains its importance, and offers methods to achieve it.

Tall Man lettering and color-coding of medication syringes provide visual cues to decrease medication ordering and administration errors. In this study, an icon was added to the standard medication label; participants were asked to identify four medications, with and without the icon, from pre-defined distances. Participants correctly identified the medications with icons slightly more often.

… design of operating rooms may affect surgical safety . … Joseph A, Khoshkenar A, Taaffe KM, et al. Minor flow …

The built environment influences the safety and effectiveness of care delivery. This narrative review examines how care facility design can reduce health care–associated infections, falls, and medication errors. The authors provide suggestions regarding a range of facility design strategies and discuss how accreditation, funding, and policy organizations can support design projects as improvement efforts.

Elements of the work environment can affect the safety of health care delivery. This literature review summarizes research to inform architectural and interior design improvements for operating rooms that support safety. The discussion highlights environmental themes associated with layout, acoustics, and lighting that can affect teamwork, processes, and communication in the operating room.

Efforts to measure and monitor patient safety improvement can help reveal how work is actually done. This commentary reviews observational study techniques to provide a framework and interactions to consider for researchers seeking to develop observational studies in health care.

This article introduces a five-tier conceptual framework recognizing both active and latent human factors issues in home health care delivery. The authors explain how the interdependencies among those elements can help inform policies to support safety for home-based patients.

This review analyzes the literature linking patient safety to hospital design elements, such as unit layout, patient room design, and lighting conditions, and highlights areas for future research.