Missed nursing care is a key indicator of patient safety and has been linked to safety climate. Survey responses from 3,429 labor and delivery nurses from 253 hospitals across the United States found an average of 11 of 25 aspects of essential nursing care were occasionally, frequently, or always missed. Higher perceived safety climate was associated with less missed care. The authors discuss the importance of strategies to reduce missed care, such as adequate nurse staffing, ensuring nonpunitive responses to errors, and promoting open communication.

… for patient engagement and health care improvement. … Lyndon A, Davis D, Sharma AE, et al. Emotional safety is …

Missed nursing care appears to be associated with higher rates of adverse events. More than 3,600 registered nurses (RNs) were surveyed about missed care during labor and birth in the United States. Three aspects of nursing care were reported missing by respondents: thorough review of prenatal records, missed timely documentation of maternal-fetal assessments, and failure to monitor input and output.

A vital component of engaging patients in safety is eliciting their perspective on how they experience both routine care and adverse events. Researchers interviewed women who gave birth in hospitals about what contributed to their sense of safety. Participants emphasized clear communication and empathy as strategies to avoid psychological harm.

Parents and families are crucial partners in pediatric patient safety. This qualitative study of parents whose infants were hospitalized in the neonatal intensive care unit developed a conceptual model for how and when parents articulate safety concerns.

Patients' experiences with safety issues influence their perceptions of hospital quality. This study examined online reviews of hospitals and found concerns discussed in narratives that would not have surfaced using the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Services patient satisfaction instrument. A significant proportion of narrative reviews raised concern about safety and trust.

Labor and delivery care is considered high risk for sentinel events should something go wrong. This review discusses how audible surveillance in this setting can contribute to alert fatigue and distraction among nurses and raises concerns that no standards exist to improve the effectiveness of electronic fetal monitoring.

Poor communication among perinatal health care teams has been highlighted as a safety concern. Exploring human factors, leadership behaviors, and root causes that may contribute to miscommunication, this commentary recommends ways individual clinicians, team leaders, managers, organizations, and patients and their families can enhance safety in the labor and delivery setting.

This interview, observation, and survey study found that parents of infants in neonatal intensive care units identified three core aspects of safety: physical safety relating to immediate treatment, the effect of care on future development, and emotional safety for infants and family, such as having confidence in caregivers. These results argue for enhancing patient and family engagement in safety in this setting.

Safety culture in labor and delivery wards appears to be suboptimal based on this survey, which found that nearly all physician, nurse, and midwife respondents had witnessed an unsafe patient situation within the past year. However, few respondents had shared their concerns with other staff either formally or informally.

This observational study explored nurses' dynamic and complex interactions on maternity wards.

Through interviews with physicians, nurses, and midwives, this study explores the role of interpersonal relationships and authority gradients in the safety climate on an obstetrics unit.

The authors reviewed the literature on teamwork and communication initiatives from aviation and assessed the impact of these practices on safety in the perinatal setting.

This review uses a clinical scenario to discuss key elements of improving nurse–physician communication, a critical requirement for providing safe care.