Anesthesia provision is a high-risk practice. This guidance provides practical steps to ensure perioperative medication delivery is as safe as possible. This material recommends approaches for both clinicians and organizations to enable collaborative safety efforts in anesthesia, including prefilled syringes, standardization, and adherence to safe labeling practices.

Previous research has identified disparities in adverse events and patient safety risks for Black patients compared to White patients. In this study, researchers used a large healthcare system’s malpractice database to examine racial differences in malpractice lawsuits. Although there were no significant race differences in lawsuits, findings suggest that employees are more likely to identify potential malpractice events for White patients compared to Black patients.

Hospitalized children are vulnerable to patient safety risks. Using a large malpractice claims database, researchers found that a wide range of pediatric surgical specialties – including orthopedics, general surgery, and otolaryngology – are most frequently associated with malpractice lawsuits. The study identified several potentially modifiable factors (i.e., patient evaluations, technical performance, and communication) that can lead to improvements in pediatric surgical safety.

… J Med Radiat Sci … Reporting of near misses and adverse events can provide a foundation for learning from error. This quality … towards self or others). … Adamson L, Beldham-Collins R, Sykes J, et al. Evaluating incident learning systems and …

… J Patient Saf … Building on prior research , this study … handling, blood bank, and safety/security. … Thomas AD, Pandit C, Krevat SA. Race differences in reported "near miss" … in health care system high reliability organizations. J Patient Saf. 2021;17(8):e1605-e1608. …

… maybe contributing to increased rates of never events. … Olivarius‐McAllister J, Pandit M, Sykes A, et al. How can never event …

… J Patient Saf … J Patient Saf … Racial disparities in patient safety are … understudied. This analysis of voluntary safety reports at a health system encompassing 10 hospitals found that a higher than expected proportion of white patients were …

… International journal of surgery (London, England) … Int J Surg … Teamwork training enhances communication and safety …

Reviewing data reported from every public hospital in the United Kingdom and Ireland regarding accidental patient awareness during anesthesia, this study revealed that distress and longer-term harm were prevalent in such incidents despite their short time duration (most lasted less than 5 minutes). The majority of cases were found to be preventable, emphasizing the need to avoid these events.

This study details the novel methodology and protocols developed by the 5th National Audit Project for reporting, categorizing, and analyzing events related to accidental awareness during general anesthesia in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

This survey revealed that many adults do not understand instructions for common liquid prescription medications, potentially increasing the risk of serious medication errors. Prior research in this field has demonstrated that low health literacy is an important predictor of misunderstanding prescription instructions. Concerningly, in this study nearly 1 in 5 patients who had adequate health literacy could not correctly interpret the instructions, and patients with marginal or low health literacy were at even greater risk. A previous WebM&M commentary discusses safety problems caused by low health literacy.