Adverse events can contribute to physical, financial, or emotional harm. Based on radiology-related events identified in a hospital incident reporting system, the authors identified the types of incidents contributing to emotional harm in patients – failure to be patient-centered, disrespectful communication, privacy violations, minimization of patient concerns, and loss of property. The authors also proposed several improvement strategies, including communication training and improvement of communication processes, individual feedback, and improvements to existing processes and systems.

This commentary reviews general aspects of the disclosure movement, supportive evidence, and challenges associated with liability concerns. The authors discuss barriers unique to radiology that have hindered acceptance of the practice and highlight how communication-and-resolution programs can support radiologist participation in disclosure conversations.

Raising concerns in real time can prevent adverse events. This review examines human characteristics that affect the ability of health care workers to report safety events in radiology. Barriers to reporting included organizational culture, accountability, communication weaknesses, and authority gradients. The authors suggest tactics at the organizational, leadership, and staff levels to address conditions that deter raising concerns, including use of structured communication methods such as SBAR.

This review highlights key elements that enable research efforts to assess the current state of safety in radiology. The authors discuss safety culture, education, data infrastructure, incident reporting, and performance measures as specific areas of interest that require deeper understanding to improve the quality and safety of radiologic services.

Improving the culture of safety within health care is an essential component of preventing errors. This commentary discusses the culture of radiology in the context of recent progress in understanding and reducing diagnostic error. The authors suggest that peer-oriented feedback and assessment would drive progress in improving safety in radiology.

This commentary introduces the failure mode and effects analysis process developed by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for Patient Safety and reviews its usefulness in the context of clinical magnetic resonance imaging.

This commentary discusses factors that contribute to diagnostic errors in radiology and describes a classification scheme to identify and prevent potential failures.

This article describes a process for analyzing adverse events and explains concepts including error detection, reporting, disclosure, risk management, and education, along with suggestions to prevent future errors.

Root cause analysis of errors in interpreting radiographic studies in oncology patients revealed several areas for improvement, ranging from technical factors to active errors and human factors.