Organizational incident reporting allows for investigation of contributing factors and formation of improvement recommendations, but some recommendations are weak (e.g., staff training) and do not result in system change. This review found 4,579 recommendations from 11 studies, with less than 7% classified as "strong". There was little explanation for how the recommendations were generated or if they resulted in improvements in safety or quality of care. The authors contend additional research into how recommendations are generated and if they result in sustained improvement is needed.

Feedback interventions (e.g., debriefing, peer-to-peer, audit, and feedback) can encourage learning from safety events and improve quality of care. This systematic review of 48 studies found that providing feedback to emergency medical services (EMS) personnel can improve documentation and adherence to protocols, with some studies also documenting improvements in clinical decision-making and cardiac arrest performance.

Reducing low-value tests and treatments has been a focus of patient safety efforts, but less attention has been focused on low-value patient safety practices (PSP). This study describes the concept of “safety clutter” and understanding which PSP are of low-value, ineffective, and could be discontinued. Frequently cited PSP included paperwork, duplication, and intentional rounding.

Patient and caregiver engagement in medical treatment can promote safety. This scoping review explored the qualitive research regarding how patients and caregivers engage in safety during cancer treatment. Four themes were identified – patient perception and involvement in safety; patient engagement in their care; safety as a collective responsibility; and the importance of caregivers relative to the amount of support they receive.

Providers who are involved in a medial error may experience a range of negative emotions and utilize a variety of coping mechanisms following the error. The authors update their 2010 systematic review on medical professionals’ coping with medical error and apply their Recovery from Situations of Error Theory (ReSET) model. The ReSET model provides a basis to develop and evaluate interventions to reduce feelings of distress and increase providers’ coping skills.

Many organizations have implemented interventions to support healthcare professionals after involvement with a medical error. Healthcare professionals who completed a proactive, resilience-based development program reported the program as useful in preparing them to cope with errors; however, they also recommend that a systems approach to increasing resiliency is needed alongside individual-level interventions.

The delivery of safe, reliable, quality healthcare requires a culture of safety. This systematic review of 14 studies identified a significant relationship between healthcare staff engagement and safety culture, errors, and adverse events. The authors suggest that increasing staff engagement could be an effective way to enhance patient safety.  

… as likely to experience a medication order error. … Blaine K, Wright J, Pinkham A, et al. Medication order errors at …

… disclosure training and guidance). … Sattar R, Johnson J, Lawton R. The views and experiences of patients and …

Team reflexivity represents the way individuals and team members collectively reflect on actions and behaviors, and the context in which these actions occur.  This systematic review identified 15 studies describing the use of team reflexivity within healthcare teams. Included interventions, most commonly simulation training  and video-reflexive ethnography, focused on the use of reflexivity to improve teamwork and communication. However, methodological limitations of included studies precluded the authors from drawing conclusions around the impact of team reflexivity alone on teamwork and communication.

This qualitative study compared four high-performing geriatric inpatient units with four average-performance units in order to understand factors that contribute to high performance. The authors conclude that the safety practices did not differ between the high versus average performers. Instead, optimal teamwork and positive safety culture led the high-performing wards to implement these safety practices in a more effective way.

Mentors can serve as coaches to help improve clinician performance. This study examined whether having a professional mentor affected physicians' involvement in an adverse event or near miss. In an online survey, 85% of physicians reported involvement in either an adverse event or near miss, and nearly half described having a mentor. Physicians with mentors were about 10% less likely to be involved in adverse events or near misses, across differing levels of harm. The authors conclude that mentoring for physicians may reduce preventable harm but suggest that further research is needed to determine the elements of mentorship that improve safety outcomes. In a past PSNet interview, Hardeep Singh touched on the importance of mentorship in supporting patient safety researchers.

Risk aversion in clinical practice may lead to the ordering of unnecessary tests and procedures, a form of overuse that may pose harm to patients. Experienced clinicians may be more comfortable with uncertainty and risk than less experienced providers. In this cross-sectional study, researchers surveyed doctors working in three emergency departments to understand their level of experience and used vignettes to characterize their reactions to uncertainty and risk. They found a significant association between more clinical experience and less risk aversion as well as a significant association between more experience and greater ease with uncertainty. The authors caution that they cannot draw conclusions on how these findings impact patient safety. An accompanying editorial suggests that feedback is an important mechanism for improving confidence in clinical decision-making. A WebM&M commentary discussed risks related to overdiagnosis and medical overuse.

Patients' reports of safety concerns can reveal adverse events that would not be identified otherwise. In this cluster-randomized trial of patient engagement, patient volunteers read and classified incident reports submitted by hospitalized patients enrolled in the study. Following classification by patients, reports underwent a standardized, validated review by multiple researchers to determine if the event constituted a patient safety incident. Overall, about one-third of patient-reported concerns were deemed to be patient safety incidents. Medication safety issues were the most prevalent concerns. The authors conclude that patient reporting of safety events lends a unique and necessary perspective to error reporting. A previous PSNet perspective highlighted the advantages to and limitations of engaging patients in patient safety.

Patient engagement can improve identification and prevention of medication errors. This qualitative study interviewed cardiology patients about their experiences managing medications after being discharged from hospitals in the United Kingdom. The authors described various types of patient engagement in medication management as sources of system resilience.

This study evaluated the implementation of a patient safety intervention. Frontline staff engagement with the intervention was highly variable and the intervention was not implemented as intended across the study sites. These results underscore the challenge of translating patient safety research into practice.

Although patient engagement is widely recommended as a patient safety strategy, its impact on patient outcomes is unclear. In this cluster randomized trial, hospital wards were designated either to receive usual hospital care or to engage patients in safety by providing a questionnaire and an opportunity to report their positive and negative safety experiences. Investigators compared a global measure of safety, which included pressure ulcers, venous thromboembolism, catheter-associated urinary tract infections, and falls, between wards that engaged patients through this intervention with those that did not. While the participating hospital wards were able to collect safety feedback from patients in a feasible and acceptable manner, researchers found no statistically significant differences in safety outcomes in the patient engagement wards and the usual care wards. The authors conclude that evidence is insufficient to recommend this questionnaire-based patient engagement strategy as a way to enhance safety.

The role of patients in promoting their own safety remains controversial. Although some studies have shown that patients are able to identify errors not detected via other means, others have shown that patients may conflate service quality with safety issues. In this feasibility study, authors describe the development and testing of an intervention designed to collect feedback from hospitalized patients about the safety of their care.

This systematic review examined whether patient and family member activation of rapid response teams improved recognition of clinical deterioration. Studies demonstrated that patients and family members did not overwhelm rapid response capacity with frequent activations, but they did activate rapid response to convey concerns beyond clinical deterioration. The authors suggest further study is needed to determine how to best engage patients and families to detect clinical deterioration early.

… as the ability to raise concerns ) were successful. … Wright J, Lawton R, O'Hara J, et al. Health Services and Delivery Research. …