Well-designed workspaces minimize disruptions and distractions. This review and study describes several important ways to improve the anesthesia workspace in the operating room. Recommendations include demarcating an anesthesia zone with adequate space for equipment and storage and that restricts unnecessary staff travel into and through the zone. Each recommendation includes an illustrative diagram, explains its importance, and offers methods to achieve it.

Tall Man lettering and color-coding of medication syringes provide visual cues to decrease medication ordering and administration errors. In this study, an icon was added to the standard medication label; participants were asked to identify four medications, with and without the icon, from pre-defined distances. Participants correctly identified the medications with icons slightly more often.

… care system at the organizational and team levels. … Gaw M, Rosinia F, Diller T. Quality and the Health System: Becoming a High …

Efforts to measure and monitor patient safety improvement can help reveal how work is actually done. This commentary reviews observational study techniques to provide a framework and interactions to consider for researchers seeking to develop observational studies in health care.

There is a recognized challenge in developing true opportunities for improvement with incident reporting. Using a case study method, this commentary describes a tested incident assessment framework that employs charting mechanisms to monitor both harm and nonharm events that result in process or workflow changes to indicate reliability of care in real time.

Although root cause analysis is widely used to detect safety hazards, questions have been raised regarding its effectiveness. This study reports on one health system's experience using the Human Factors Analysis Classification System as an alternate method to investigate errors.