The World Health Organization (WHO) surgical safety checklist is widely used in surgical settings to prevent errors. This multinational panel representing multiple clinical specialties identified 16 recommendations for checklist content modification and implementation during the COVID-19 pandemic. These recommendations exemplify how the checklist can be adapted to meet urgent and emerging needs of surgical units by targeting important processes and encouraging critical discussions.

Recent high-profile incidents in the United States and the United Kingdom have fueled debate on the impact of criminalizing medical mistakes that result in patient harm. This article compares how the United Kingdom and New Zealand respond when patients experience unintentional health care–related harm. The authors emphasize the importance of focusing on resolution and learning to improve patient safety.

Safe anesthesia is a global concern. These standards provide guidance and recommendations for clinicians, administrators, and governments as they review, implement, and manage anesthesia services in a variety of care environments. The standards center on themes related to professional qualification; facilities and equipment; medications and intravenous fluids; monitoring; and anesthesia delivery.

Simulation-based education in health care is common, and typically training exercises use artificial and expired medications instead of actual products. This commentary describes how these fake medications can introduce risks when they are accidentally incorporated into active medication inventory and suggests strategies to reduce such confusion in care environments.

This hospital introduced large print, wall-mounted checklist posters in their operating rooms (ORs) and specifically assigned the leadership of each domain of the checklist to a different OR group (anesthesia, nursing, and surgery). These inexpensive changes led to improvements in team engagement and compliance with the surgical safety checklist process.

The World Health Organization's surgical safety checklist has been successfully implemented in multiple clinical settings. This study, conducted in Moldova, found that checklist usage remained high 2 years after initial implementation, with postoperative complication rates continuing to decline over that time period.

This review explores safety in cardiac surgery and suggests that the anesthesiologist in the surgical team is in the optimal position to maintain an overarching view of the care being provided to a patient, able to ensure that evidence-based practices are followed and appropriate care is delivered.

Anesthesiologists were observed to violate sterile technique frequently when administering medications in a simulated setting. These protocol violations could contribute to hospital-acquired infections.

Drug administration errors are a major safety concern in anesthesiology, as even routine cases can require administration of several high-risk medications. In this randomized controlled trial, a novel system for drug administration was evaluated in comparison with usual anesthesia practice. The new system was designed according to human factors engineering principles and included proven safety measures such as barcode medication administration. Although fewer overall errors occurred with the new system, the reduction in administration errors occurred only when barcoding was performed consistently and safety alerts were heeded. The anesthesia field has long been a leader in patient safety, and in fact, some of the earliest studies in the patient safety field evaluated the role of human factors in anesthesia medication administration errors.

Discussing the importance of labeling in anesthesia, this commentary makes recommendations to reduce medication errors.

This review discusses evidence-based practices and technologies that can reduce the incidence of medication errors.

Using an example from aviation, this article describes medical errors in the context of the law and considers whether legal response affects safety.

Success in patient safety is generally measured in incremental steps rather than giant leaps, but this pioneering study certainly represents the latter. Eight hospitals with widely differing resources and patient populations were required to implement a checklist based on the World Health Organization's Safe Surgery Saves Lives guidelines. The 19-item checklist focused on three key junctures: sign in (before induction of anesthesia), timeout (immediately before skin incision), and sign out (when the patient is ready to leave the operating room). It also included specific measures to improve teamwork and reduce the risk of surgical site infection. Checklist implementation resulted in significant reductions in mortality and inpatient complications. Checklists have already proved to be a powerful intervention in improving patient safety. This study's senior author, Atul Gawande, wrote about the success of checklists in preventing central-line associated bloodstream infections in a 2007 New Yorker article.

The authors discuss barriers to implementing patient safety reforms in New Zealand.

The authors discuss a patient safety–focused, shared learning program developed by the medical and health faculty at the University of Auckland. Faculty of the program used root cause analysis to illustrate that underlying failures in a system can lead to individual error.