Usability concerns continue to affect the safe use of electronic health information systems. This commentary describes the role of vendors in improving usability, how regular testing can ensure safety, and the impact of organizational culture on the safe use of information technology over time.

Retained surgical items (RSIs) can lead to serious patient harm. Survey findings from 21 clinicians and stakeholders in Switzerland emphasized the importance of addressing production pressures, encouraging a culture of safety and teamwork, and implementation of effective counting procedures to reduce the incidence of retained surgical items.

Surgical site infections (SSI) are a common, but preventable, complication following surgery. This study sought to determine the association of commitment to, knowledge of, and social norms surrounding SSI prevention efforts and safety climate strength and level. Based on responses from nearly 2,800 operating room personnel in Sweden, only commitment and social norms were associated with safety climate level. None were associated with safety climate strength.

Anesthesia medications prepared in the operating room are vulnerable to errors at all stages of medication administration, including preparation and dilution. In this study, anesthesiologists were asked to prepare the mixture of three drugs used for spinal anesthesia for cesarean section. Results show deviation from the expected concentration and variability between providers. The authors recommend all medications be prepared in the hospital pharmacy or purchased pre-mixed from the manufacturer to prevent these errors. 

Effective patient safety improvement efforts address safety threats at the individual, interpersonal, and organizational levels. This study characterizes safety measures described in incident reports from German outpatient care settings. Of the 243 preventative measures identified across 160 reports, 83% of preventative measures were classified by the research team as “weak,” meaning that they focus on influencing human behavior rather than on treating underlying problems (e.g., alerts, trainings, double checks).

Historically, there have been many patient safety errors associated with healthcare workers’ failure to speak up and report when they notice a problem. Many studies have identified organizational culture as important in creating a safe environment for workers to report medical errors. This study reports on a multimodal program to educate and train healthcare workers resulting in improvements on speaking up behaviors.

The World Health Organization (WHO) surgical safety checklist (SSC) can improve perioperative outcomes but implementation challenges persist. This study found that peer observation and immediate peer feedback improved SSC compliance and identified primary areas for future efforts to further improve compliance (i.e., reducing interruptions and improving sign outs).

… reactions from involved individuals. … Niederhauser A, Schwappach DLB. Speaking up or remaining silent about patient …

Polypharmacy and potentially inappropriate medications continue to pose health risks in older adults. Using a Delphi approach, experts identified 85 minimal requirements for safe medication prescribing in nursing homes. The five key topics recommend structured, regular review and monitoring, interprofessional collaboration, and involving the resident.

Checklists are used across clinical areas. Following the publication of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Surgical Safety Checklist in 2009, other organizations developed their own checklists or adapted the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist for local settings. The authors analyzed 24 checklists used in 18 Swiss hospitals, identified major differences between study checklists and reference checklists and provided recommendations for future research regarding the effectiveness of surgical safety checklists. 

This study examined patient safety issues stemming from health information technology (HIT)-related information management hazards. The authors identified eleven thematic groups describing such hazards occurring at a systemic level, such as fragmentation of patient information, “information islands” (e.g., nurses and physicians have separate information sets despite the same HIT system), and inadequate information structures (e.g., no drug interaction warning integrated in the chemotherapy prescribing tool).

Double checking is one strategy for detecting and preventing medication errors; however, its effectiveness is unclear. This editorial presents a framework intended to further research and clinical practice by defining and classifying checking procedures and differentiating them from other medication-related safety behaviors.

This study focused on healthcare workers speaking-up behavior in six psychiatric hospitals in Switzerland. The authors found significant differences in speaking-up despite having moderate to high scores on items that were associated with psychological safety. Although nurses reported patient safety concerns more frequently, they also remained silent more often compared with psychologists and physicians, indicating they may feel less psychological safety.

This synthesis of 19 qualitative studies of the second victim phenomenon, or the effects of an adverse outcome or error on clinicians, establishes a framework to characterize second victim experiences. The authors recommend including second victim perspectives into root cause analyses in order to improve safety culture.

Human factors perspectives can inform design and implementation of safety interventions in health care. This commentary summarizes the role of human factors engineering and checklists as safety improvement strategies in plastic surgery. The authors highlight nontechnical skill development, checklist customization, raising of concerns, and safety assessment as key areas of focus for the specialty.

Interdisciplinary team care interventions are increasingly common on medical wards, based partly on a widespread belief that these practices will improve efficiency and patient safety. This systematic review sought to evaluate the performance of hospital-based interdisciplinary teams on patient outcomes. The majority of studies have chosen length of stay, complications, readmission, or mortality rates as their primary outcomes, but interdisciplinary teams rarely seem to affect these traditional quality measures, which may be insensitive to teamwork improvements in care delivery. The authors call for establishing more relevant outcomes to evaluate interdisciplinary team interventions. An accompanying commentary notes that this systematic review provides an opportunity to highlight the potential harms of choosing the wrong metrics to evaluate an intervention, which can undermine a program's mission.

This cross-sectional study at three London hospitals evaluated factors related to surgical ward patients' willingness to call for help. Although patients were more likely to call a nurse for help, they were more willing to ask for help if encouraged to do so by a doctor rather than a nurse.

Failure to rescue—lack of adequate response to patient deterioration—has been associated with adverse patient outcomes, particularly in acute care settings. This systematic review found that high hospital volume and increased patient-to-nurse staffing ratios were associated with failure to rescue, suggesting that addressing these workforce issues may enhance ability to recognize and intervene for deteriorating patients.

The remarkable initial success of the World Health Organization surgical safety checklist led to the United Kingdom's National Health Service mandating its use in 2009. Subsequent studies of the checklist, however, have failed to demonstrate improvements in perioperative complication rates. This study analyzed the relationship between checklist implementation and complication rates at five hospitals in the UK. The investigators found that the checklist was effective only when it was fully completed—the odds of a postoperative complication were reduced by more than 40% if the full checklist was completed, but this was done in only 62% of cases. Moreover, even complete checklist usage did not seem to prevent complications in low-risk patients. The results of this and other studies clearly demonstrate that a checklist is a complex intervention that requires rigorous implementation and monitoring in order to improve safety.

This direct observation study used a standardized protocol to assess the implementation of the safe surgery checklist and found wide variation in actual use of the tool. Challenges with implementation are thought to explain varying efficacy of checklists in clinical practice, in contrast to dramatic reductions in surgical mortality and complications in clinical trials.