Systems thinking concepts are used by healthcare organizations to encourage learning from failures and identifying solutions to complex patient safety problems. This article outlines a refined and validated set of systems thinking tenets and discusses how they can be used to proactively identify threats to patient safety.

Medication administration is a complex process with many opportunities for error. Using the Event Analysis of Systemic Teamwork (EAST) model, researchers identified opportunities to improve medication administration system performance and promote patient safety. The authors discuss the networks involved in medication administration (e.g., task network, social network, information network) and how the complexities involved in each network contribute to medication administration errors.

… that can prevent or mitigate work-related violence. … Salmon PM, Coventon L, Read GJM. A systems analysis of work-related violence in …

Organizations are encouraged to proactively identify patient safety risks and learn from failures. This article describes validity testing of systems-thinking risk assessment (Net-HARMS) to identify risks associated with patient medication administration and an accident analysis method (AcciMap) to analyze a medication administration error.

… role of ergonomics and human factors in reducing error. … Read GJM, Shorrock S, Walker GH, et al. State of science: …

… communication, and performance. An April 2020 WebM&M commentary discusses the effect of power dynamics on … interprofessional healthcare teams. … Stevens EL, Hulme A, Salmon PM. The impact of power on health care team …