Systems thinking concepts are used by healthcare organizations to encourage learning from failures and identifying solutions to complex patient safety problems. This article outlines a refined and validated set of systems thinking tenets and discusses how they can be used to proactively identify threats to patient safety.

Medication administration is a complex process with many opportunities for error. Using the Event Analysis of Systemic Teamwork (EAST) model, researchers identified opportunities to improve medication administration system performance and promote patient safety. The authors discuss the networks involved in medication administration (e.g., task network, social network, information network) and how the complexities involved in each network contribute to medication administration errors.

Healthcare workers are at high risk of violence from patients, caregivers, and other healthcare workers. Researchers used three systems thinking methods (ActorMap, AcciMap, and PreventiMap) and stakeholder input to identify factors contributing to work-related violence incidents and interventions that can prevent or mitigate work-related violence.

Organizations are encouraged to proactively identify patient safety risks and learn from failures. This article describes validity testing of systems-thinking risk assessment (Net-HARMS) to identify risks associated with patient medication administration and an accident analysis method (AcciMap) to analyze a medication administration error.

Human error can affect the safety of care delivery. This article provides an overview of human error, the theories and methods available to understand, prevent, and mitigate human error, and the role of ergonomics and human factors in reducing error.

… communication, and performance. An April 2020 WebM&M commentary discusses the effect of power dynamics on interprofessional healthcare teams. … Stevens EL, Hulme A, Salmon PM. The impact of power on health care team …