This literature review summarizes approaches to crisis management used by non-healthcare institutions (e.g., private businesses, large military organizations) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and how healthcare organizations – particularly the surgical community – can leverage these approaches in operational planning and crisis management.

… quality, and reliable feedback . This review describes a framework to better understand the challenges affecting …

… the instances of longer-than-average length of stay for a given diagnosis. The study team found that incomplete …

… sought to harness this expertise and perspective through a multifaceted intervention that involved structured … found that the prospective safety intervention created a sense of psychological safety in which team members were … with better insights into issues affecting care delivery. A past PSNet perspective discussed workarounds and resiliency …

Implementation science is utilized to understand how to apply research into practice. This review explores the use of implementation science in surgical patient safety initiatives to enable the translation of research into active care. The authors focus their discussion on the widely implemented World Health Organization surgical checklist to identify factors that drive and sustain improvement, including context, implementation strategies, and outcomes.

… BMJ quality & safety … BMJ Qual Saf … Middle managers have a key role in successful improvement efforts, but engaging … can be challenging. This narrative review describes a model that involves middle managers and frontline …

Measuring patient safety for individual hospitals and health systems remains a challenge. Incident reports provide one lens into patient safety, despite concerns about under-reporting. Numerous incident reports may indicate either a high number of errors or a robust safety culture that encourages blame-free event reporting. Therefore, it is unclear whether the volume of incident reports should serve as a patient safety metric. In this study, investigators analyzed all incident reports from the national reporting system in the United Kingdom and determined that hospitals with fewer litigation claims had more incident reports. They found no association between mortality or patient satisfaction and number of reports, and more incident reporting took place where survey results indicated a positive safety culture. These findings suggest that having a high quantity of incident reports does not signify an error-prone environment, and the authors recommend against using incident reporting rates as a quality metric. A past PSNet perspective discussed incident reporting systems as tools for improving patient safety.

… & safety … BMJ Qual Saf … Workflow interruptions are often a necessary reality in busy clinical settings, but they can … risks for patient safety. This mixed-method study in a medium-sized community emergency department (ED) found that … for the consequences of interruptions. A prior AHRQ WebM&M perspective discussed interruptions and distractions in …

… are increasingly common on medical wards, based partly on a widespread belief that these practices will improve … metrics to evaluate an intervention, which can undermine a program's mission. …

… was effective only when it was fully completed—the odds of a postoperative complication were reduced by more than 40% if … results of this and other studies clearly demonstrate that a checklist is a complex intervention that requires rigorous implementation …

… … Am J Surg … This observational study examined the use of a commercial mobile application among members of an emergency … surgery team. Analysis of messages found it to be a safe and efficient method of communication that was …

… that approximately 1 in 20 surgical patients experiences a preventable adverse event, most of which are related to …

An evaluation tool for assessing emergency physicians' nontechnical skills, such as teamwork, communication, and leadership, appeared to be reliable and reproducible in this multicenter study.

This study reports on a failure mode and effect analysis used to detect and prioritize potential patient safety threats for surgical patients. Patients were directly involved in determining the severity of each potential hazard, providing a novel example of how patients may be engaged in safety efforts.

… like surgery. This study reports on the development of a tool to assess emergency physicians' nontechnical skills. …

This review sought to identify nontechnical and teamwork skills that contribute to safety in emergency departments.

… Emergency medicine journal : EMJ … Emerg Med J … A structured tool for handoffs improved the quality of shift change handoffs in a British emergency department. …

… journal : EMJ … Emerg Med J … Medical and nursing staff in a London emergency department reported that poor teamwork and …

… more than one-third of children who subsequently died in a pediatric intensive care unit. …

The operating room is an environment often rife with communication problems. This mixed methods study examined information transfer problems from the perspectives of nurses, surgeons, and anesthesiologists with the goal of defining interventions beneficial for each discipline.