The National Patient Safety Goals (NPSGs) are one of the major methods by which The Joint Commission establishes standards for ensuring patient safety in all health care settings. In order to ensure health care facilities focus on preventing major sources of patient harm, The Joint Commission regularly revises the NPSGs based on their impact, cost, and effectiveness. Major focus areas include promoting surgical safety and preventing hospital-acquired infections, medication errors, inpatient suicide, and specific clinical harms such as falls and pressure ulcers. The 2023 goals, which include a goal to improve health equity, are now available.

Warfarin and other anticoagulants are high-alert medications that, if errors occur in their use, can result in considerable harm. This document advocates that a stewardship approach be applied to anticoagulant therapy to reduce the risk of adverse events and discusses steps to implement and sustain a program to guide the safe, effective use of anticoagulants.

Errors of omission in routine care can result in patient harm. This report discusses factors contributing to a pulmonary embolism in a recovering stroke patient acerbated by a lack of intended but omitted venous thromboembolism or VTE preventative care. The system improvement recommendations drawn from the incident analysis include that the UK National Health Service develop a standardized approach to VTE risk assessment and broad-based training to enable a cross-section of clinicians to use VTE prevention devices as required.

Unit-based pharmacy services help to mitigate and catch medication errors. This report highlights a case of a medication error death and describes how embedding clinical pharmacy services could have prevented this incident. The report provides system level recommendations to enhance this service including defining the role of clinical pharmacy teams and prioritizing the tactic as an important improvement strategy.   

Smart infusion pumps are widely used in hospitals to reduce medication errors but have the potential to create problems if not correctly used. This article discusses heparin administration programming errors and recommends independent double-checks, electronic health record and smart pump interoperability and weight-based dosing as tactics to minimize mistakes.