The surge of patients during the COVID-19 pandemic forced the redeployment of non-intensive care certified staff into intensive care units (ICU). This study surveyed both intensive care (IC)-certified and non-IC-certified healthcare providers who were working in ICUs at the beginning of the pandemic. Qualitative synthesis identified five themes related to supervision; quality and safety of care; collaboration, communication, and climate; recruitment, scheduling and team composition, and; organization and facilities. The authors provide recommendations for future deployments.

Physician trainees are required to learn patient safety concepts during residency. This study describes a curriculum that taught psychiatry residents hands-on adverse event analysis skills and culminated in a root cause analysis presentation to hospital safety experts. A past PSNet perspective examined graduate medical education's role in improving safety.

Year-end handoffs in residency training settings are a known patient safety risk. This narrative review found that several practices can enhance the safety of year-end transitions, including standardizing written and verbal signout for high-risk patients and enhancing attending-level supervision.

Implementing standardized handoff processes has garnered attention as a strategy to improve patient safety. In this commentary, the authors apply cognitive load theory to handoff tasks to demonstrate how to improve handover bundles and enhance reliability.

According to this survey study, a substantial minority of psychiatry residency training programs reported that they did not provide formal training in handoffs, which is now required by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. Barriers to developing such training included difficulty attaining buy-in from clinicians and standardizing handoffs across different sites.

The beginning of residency training for new interns has long been rumored to result in preventable harm for patients, a phenomenon known as the "July Effect" in the US and by the more macabre term "August killing season" in the UK. However, prior studies have reached conflicting conclusions about whether the "July Effect" truly exists. This systematic review of 39 studies provides the first comprehensive evidence that being hospitalized in July may actually be harmful, as a subset of larger and higher quality studies did find that mortality increased and efficiency of care decreased in association with new residents assuming their duties. Unfortunately, most studies included in the review had methodological flaws, meaning that the exact degree of harm could not be quantified.

This commentary identifies the contributing factors in a case of patient suicide during the course of year-end resident turnover.

This study describes a process to better manage transitions that occur when panels of patients are transferred from an outgoing trainee to an incoming one each summer.

Care transitions pose a risk to patient safety. This commentary discusses the problems inherent when patient care responsibilities are transferred from graduating residents to their successors, and suggests methods by which residency programs can ensure safe transitions in this setting.

This study describes the application of Toyota Production System principles, which emphasize designing standardized and reliable work processes by an iterative process of testing and evaluation, to improving patient safety and continuity of care at a psychiatric institution.

This study required outgoing residents to explicitly identify their high-risk patients as part of a year-end handoff in care, and demonstrated significant improvements in early patient follow-up and resident perceptions of improved quality of care.