Effective team communication is essential during crisis management. In this study, 60 anesthesiologists participating in a simulated perioperative anaphylaxis crisis scenario identified common clinical factors prompting crisis acknowledgement.

The well-being of healthcare workers is essential to the delivery of high quality, safe care. This article proposes a definition of “avoidable employee harm” (e.g., retaliation for speaking up about safety concerns) and describes how prioritizing organizational safety culture can increase both employee and patient safety.

Safety II involves studying what goes right in patient care instead of what went wrong. Using a video reflexive ethnography method and a Safety II approach, researchers analyzed the ways in which staff provided safe care in a specialized dementia ward. Identified themes included negotiating risk and balancing personhood vs. protocols.

Maternal morbidity and mortality are disproportionately experienced by persons of color in the United States. The authors of this article present a socioecological model for understanding the individual, interpersonal, organizational, community, and societal factors contributing to Black maternal morbidity and mortality. The authors outline several recommendations for improving care, including workforce diversification, incorporating social determinants of health and health disparities into health professional education, and exploring the impact of structural racism on maternal health outcomes.  

Failure to rescue refers to delayed or missed recognition of clinical deterioration, which can lead to patient complications and death. In this article, the authors used health economics methods to understand the health economic impacts associated with failure to rescue. The authors discuss the economic perspectives of various decision makers and how each group defines value. 

Cognitive biases can threaten patient safety in a variety of ways. This narrative review summarizes the common cognitive biases in surgical care and how they threaten patient safety, including delays in diagnosis and treatment, unnecessary surgeries, and intraoperative errors and complications. The authors also discuss cognitive debiasing strategies to mitigate the impact of cognitive biases.

… and families to be involved in the follow-up. … Adams M,  Hartley J, Sanford N, et al. Strengthening open …

… AIMS Program remains low. … Ledlie S,  Gomes T, Dolovich L, et al. Medication errors in community pharmacies: …

Human factors engineering has the potential to mitigate failures by designing workspaces and processes to prevent errors from occurring. This guidance uses the hierarchy of controls framework to organize human-factors recommendations focusing on the design of anesthesia environments and equipment to infuse protections into care service.

Careful medication management in long-term care residents is associated with improved hospital readmission rates and reduced fall rates. In the UK, pharmacist independent prescribers (PIP) can initiate, change, or monitor medications, and this cluster randomized controlled trial evaluated the effect of PIPs on fall rates. After six months of PIP involvement, fall rates (the primary outcome) were not statistically different than the usual care group, although drug burden was reduced.

… mitigations, education, and training. … Kelly FE, Frerk C, Bailey CR, et al. Human factors in anaesthesia: a narrative …

… at least one risk factor for misuse. … Bloomer A, Wally M, Bailey G, et al. Balancing safety, comfort, and fall risk: an …

Alert fatigue occurs when healthcare workers become desensitized to alarms over time, especially when alarms tend to be clinically nonsignificant, and therefore, ignored or not responded to. This study reports on one health system’s redesign of cardiac monitoring structure to reduce alert fatigue. Through a four-phase quality improvement project, three hospitals were able to decrease alarms by 74-95% and sustained the results for 12 months.

I-PASS is a structured handoff tool to enhance communication during patient transfers and improve patient safety. This study found that I-PASS implementation at 32 hospitals decreased major and minor handoff-related adverse events and improved key handoff elements (e.g., frequency of handoffs with high verbal quality) across provider types and settings.

… will yield less detail than the longer version. … Barnard C, Chung JW, Flaherty V, et al. Development and validation of …

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) use a variety of quality indicators to measure and rank hospital performance. In this study, researchers analyzed the variance between AHRQ pediatric quality indicators and CMS hospital-acquired condition indicators and evaluated the use of alternative composite scores. The researchers identified substantial within-hospital variation across the indicators and could not identify a single composite measure capable of capturing all of the variance observed across the broad range of outcomes. The authors call for additional research to identify meaningful approaches to performance ranking for children’s hospitals.

… remained unchanged at “average” before and after. … Hansen M, Harrod T, Bahr N, et al. The effects of leadership …

… the incident from reoccurring. … Wailling J, Kooijman A, Hughes J, et al. Humanizing harm: Using a restorative … to heal and learn from adverse events. Health Expect. E pub 2022 Mar 23. doi: 10.1111/hex.13478 …

The COVID pandemic has increased demand and acceptance of remote care modalities. This commentary suggests that home monitoring is a promising telehealth approach and that its application could improve value while enhancing safety for hospital-at-home and other levels of home-based care patients.

Trigger tools are one method of retrospectively detecting adverse events. In this study, researchers used data from 31 Spanish hospitals to validate a trigger tool in general and gastrointestinal surgery departments. Of 40 triggers, 12 were identified for optimizing predictive power of the trigger tool, including broad spectrum antibiotherapy, unscheduled postoperative radiology, and reintervention.