Training in patient safety concepts is an important element of health professional education. This article describes learning objectives on patient safety generated by experts on patient safety and medical education. These learning objectives showed high correspondence with the WHO Patient Safety Curriculum Guide’s learning objectives.

Organizations with robust safety culture, as measured by AHRQ's Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture, have improved objective measures of safety. Researchers compared the AHRQ survey to a factorial survey examining safety behavior among employees in a radiotherapy department. The two surveys yielded similar results, while the factorial survey added that staff were more likely to report safety concerns if they caused patient harm.

In this cross-sectional study, researchers administered the SCOPE–Primary Care survey instrument to measure seven dimensions of safety culture across two home care services in Belgium. They found handovers and teamwork to be the most negatively perceived aspects of safety culture.

Use of checklists has been widely promoted to improve surgical safety. However, little is known about how patients perceive their use. In this survey study, researchers found that patients view the surgical safety checklist favorably and believe it has a positive impact on safety.

This study recruited participants from a patient advocacy forum to complete an online survey. A significant proportion noted safety incidents in the course of managing chronic illness, including falls, adverse drug events, and errors in diagnosis or treatment. These results underscore the need to include patients in efforts to improve the safety of chronic disease care.

This qualitative study enumerates barriers and facilitators to implementing checklists, but also confirms the importance of a shared safety culture in aligning different stakeholders—including surgeons, anesthesiologists, and nurses—to enable implementation.

Lean, a work system improvement method drawn from engineering, is being increasingly used in health systems, but there is little evidence about how it affects patient safety. This study found that health care staff reported more positive safety culture after undertaking lean activities compared to their reported safety culture before participating, suggesting that efforts to improve health system efficiency may foster patient safety culture.

Prior studies have found that unplanned transfers to the intensive care unit are generally not preventable. This study challenges that viewpoint, finding that preventable adverse events may have contributed to the need to escalate care in many patients.

This quality improvement study found that adherence to patient safety measures while providing radiation therapy—such as verifying patient identification—increased when work processes were standardized. This finding echoes prior work in applying human factors principles to health care.

This systematic review was unable to estimate the incidence and preventability rate of adverse events that precipitate intensive care unit admission due to study heterogeneity. The authors discuss the recommended prevention strategies, including rapid response systems, but also raise concerns about the limited evidence surrounding these strategies.