Supporting and improving clinician well-being has long been a safety focus and received renewed focus during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study sought to understand efforts undertaken to support clinicians’ well-being in Joint Commission-accredited hospitals and Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC). Only half of responding hospitals and FQHCs reported implementing at least one action towards improving clinician well-being (e.g., establishing a wellness committee) and few had implemented a comprehensive approach.

Delivering health care in the home presents unique patient safety challenges. In this study, researchers identified significant associations between Joint Commission accreditation and measures of patient experience and patient safety with home health.

The Joint Commission identifies inpatient suicide as a sentinel event. Little is known about the epidemiology of hospital suicides other than that they are rare and occur mostly in psychiatry wards. Researchers examined two national databases to develop the first data-driven appraisal of hospital suicide rates. Nationally, between 49 and 65 hospital suicides occur each year. Nearly 75% happen during psychiatric treatment, and the most common means of death is hanging. This hospital suicide rate is an order of magnitude lower than prior estimates. An accompanying editorial raises concerns about the much larger epidemic of suicide immediately after psychiatric hospital discharge. A prior WebM&M commentary highlighted additional strategies to reduce hospital suicide risk.

Over the last decade, the Lucian Leape Institute has explored five key areas in health care to advance patient safety. These include medical education reform, care integration, patient and family engagement, transparency, and joy and meaning in work and workforce safety for health care professionals. This review highlights progress to date in each area and the challenges that remain to be addressed, including increasing clinician burnout and shortcomings of existing health information technology approaches. The authors also suggest opportunities for further research such as measuring the impact of residency training programs. In a past PSNet interview, Dr. Tejal Gandhi, president of the IHI/NPSF Lucian Leape Institute, discussed improving patient safety at a national level.

The impact of electronic health records has thus far been disappointing for many clinicians, with limited effect on patient safety and growing concern that electronic health records may contribute to physician burnout. This commentary discusses the productivity paradox of information technology—the fact that digitization often initially impedes productivity rather than enhancing it. The authors highlight recent advancements in health care information technology that hold promise to overcome the productivity paradox, such as artificial intelligence, and discuss barriers that must be surmounted in order for health IT to meet its potential.

Patient safety in the ambulatory setting is gaining traction as a focus of research and improvement efforts. Discussing the methods and results of an AHRQ Technical Brief, this commentary summarizes expert opinion on the report to propose recommendations for a research strategy on ambulatory patient safety. The authors outline patient safety practices relevant to the ambulatory setting and suggest activities to advance improvement efforts in outpatient care, such as measure development and use of health information technologies.

Health care institutions are increasingly focused on providing high-value care and preventing overuse. In this study, researchers developed a validated High-Value Care Culture Survey and found that administering the survey at two large academic medical centers provided health care leaders with an opportunity to target their improvement efforts.

Patient safety research and commentary often focus on specialized care processes rather than medical wards. Exploring challenges to improving safety in the medical ward environment, this commentary outlines four strategies to address complexity of implementing initiatives in this setting.

Following implementation of the web-based Targeted Solutions Tool in a 12-hospital health system, hand hygiene rates improved from a baseline rate of 58% to about 95%. Over the same period, rates of central line–associated bloodstream infections and ventilator-associated pneumonia both declined by more than 40%.

Although financial incentives have been widely adopted, they may not lead to organizational improvements. This commentary raises concerns about including hospital mortality in incentive programs, since patient deaths do not necessarily mean poor quality care. The authors suggest that further research is needed to enhance accuracy of risk-adjusted mortality and to account for differences in patient treatment preferences.

Implementing standardized handoff processes has garnered attention as a strategy to improve patient safety. In this commentary, the authors apply cognitive load theory to handoff tasks to demonstrate how to improve handover bundles and enhance reliability.

Interdisciplinary team care interventions are increasingly common on medical wards, based partly on a widespread belief that these practices will improve efficiency and patient safety. This systematic review sought to evaluate the performance of hospital-based interdisciplinary teams on patient outcomes. The majority of studies have chosen length of stay, complications, readmission, or mortality rates as their primary outcomes, but interdisciplinary teams rarely seem to affect these traditional quality measures, which may be insensitive to teamwork improvements in care delivery. The authors call for establishing more relevant outcomes to evaluate interdisciplinary team interventions. An accompanying commentary notes that this systematic review provides an opportunity to highlight the potential harms of choosing the wrong metrics to evaluate an intervention, which can undermine a program's mission.

Professionalism in medicine is considered an essential component of safety culture, but efforts to monitor and address disruptive behaviors among physicians have not produced the desired outcomes. This commentary discusses the need for more explicit emphasis on building physician skills and attitudes to support zero harm, process improvement, high reliability, and commitment to excellence in all areas of medical care.

… decisions regarding their care. A recent AHRQ WebM&M interview with Leah Binder, President and CEO of The …

Although appropriate handwashing has been identified as an essential factor in preventing health care–associated infections, hand hygiene rates remain unacceptably low at many hospitals. This quality improvement project aimed to achieve adherence to hand hygiene practices at eight hospitals using change management methods drawn from human factors engineering. Each hospital investigated and identified specific causes of noncompliance with handwashing and developed specific interventions to address these barriers. These individualized efforts yielded a significant improvement in handwashing behavior. The authors argue that allowing each site to tailor the intervention to the specific causes of noncompliance led to the sustained improvements. This study suggests that local improvement may be a fruitful method to enhance the proven but incompletely implemented practice of hand hygiene. A recent AHRQ WebM&M interview and perspective discuss ways to enhance hand hygiene adherence.

This narrative review of safety efforts on general hospital wards found that most interventions encompass one or more of five areas: staffing levels, interprofessional collaboration, standardization of care such as use of checklists, rapid response to clinical deterioration, and safety culture. The authors advocate for increasing the evidence base in all of these areas, as gaps in implementation and sustainment are prevalent.