Community-based pharmacists have a critical role in ensuring medication safety in community settings. In this narrative review, the authors explored how collaboration between community-based pharmacists and primary care providers can improve medication safety. The most common collaboration strategy was medication review. The authors identified barriers to collaboration from both the primary care provider and pharmacist perspectives.

Older adults are particularly vulnerable to medication errors due to polypharmacy and medical complexities. In this qualitative study, healthcare professionals outlined several multifactorial hazards for medication-related harm during care transitions, including complex dosing, knowledge gaps, errors in discharge medications and gaps in access to care.

Identifying barriers and facilitators of medication safety is a patient safety research priority. In this systematic review characterizing the research on medication safety in primary care, researchers found that the majority of studies focused on high-risk populations (such as older adults with polypharmacy) and measured potential harms (such as potentially inappropriate prescribing or potential prescribing omissions) rather than actual harms.

This study evaluated trauma readiness among surgical residents following trauma surgery training and its impact on critical errors. Resident trauma readiness index increased significantly following the training, and training resulted in fewer critical errors committed by residents when compared with practicing surgeons. The trauma readiness index may help identify surgeons who would benefit from additional follow up training.

This commentary describes the application of a work system model to discharge transitions as a communication improvement strategy. The authors suggest that human factors approaches be applied to identify potential postdischarge medication safety issues.

Patient perspectives can identify previously undetected adverse events. This commentary discusses the value of seeking patient insights as an approach to measure medication safety and how such evaluation could affect implementation of meditation safety initiatives. The authors suggest adapting system-oriented approaches to reflect patient-centered concerns.

Surgeons' technical skills are associated with surgical patient outcomes. This evaluation of an educational simulation intervention found that training procedural skills measurably but variably improved surgical performance. Increased experience with procedures following the training led to residents retaining these skills for up to 18 months. These results demonstrate the critical role of procedure volume in building surgical skill and safety. A related editorial focuses on the subset of learners who did not meet technical proficiency, among whom patient safety problems could occur.

This study suggests that frontline health care technicians may be less directly engaged in safety efforts compared with other hospital staff. Since these technicians have frequent direct contact with patients, this finding could have important implications for hospital-acquired infection rates.

In this study, implementation of system-wide training and adoption of the structured communication tool SBAR were associated with challenges in uptake and physician education. However, in situations where SBAR was used correctly, physicians were more likely to be able to make clinical decisions.

Accurate initial assessment and resuscitation of trauma patients is critical to ensuring correct treatment and survival, and although standardized algorithms have been developed for initial trauma evaluation, errors are not uncommon. This innovative randomized controlled trial implemented a computerized clinician decision support system (CDSS) to ensure adherence to standardized protocols for trauma resuscitation, and used video capture of trauma resuscitations to assess the effects of the CDSS on patient outcomes. Use of the CDSS resulted in significantly reduced errors, and also reduced morbidity compared to standard treatment. This study demonstrates the utility of a CDSS in a fast-paced, high-acuity environment.

Active surveillance identified problems in the care of nearly one-third of patients in an urban emergency department.

This article discusses various methods of assessing team performance in health care, including direct observation, surveys, and video-based analysis, and outlines the strengths and drawbacks of each method.

The authors identify and analyze strategies used by surgical unit staff to adapt to high demand and overcrowding.

The authors observed and photographed ways in which staff used a whiteboard in a surgical trauma unit and found that the board was an effective tool for team collaboration and communication.

The authors summarize the uses of video in patient safety and discuss issues with its use, including legal and ethical considerations.

This study evaluated the performance of surgical residents on a training program for laparoscopic surgery, in comparison to their performance on video games and their past experience playing video games. Residents who had played video games extensively in the past demonstrated significantly superior laparoscopic skills, and laparoscopic skills were closely correlated to current video gaming ability. While simulation in surgical training has been extensively evaluated, a recent review did not find evidence for the superiority of any specific type of surgical simulation (eg, video, computer, or cadaver-based). As prior research has demonstrated a high incidence of remediable errors in laparoscopy, video games may prove to be a useful adjunct to simulation training.

The authors discuss information resources (eg, whiteboards, surgical schedule printouts) used in health care units and what characteristics should be considered when developing computerized supported collaborative work (CSCW) systems.

The authors reviewed the literature on information tools used during multidisciplinary rounding and suggest five features of computer-based tools that support communication during rounding.