Pennsylvania requires all acute care facilities to report incidents and serious events to the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Reporting System (PA-PSRS). This report compiles reports submitted in 2022 and compares results to previous years. There was a decrease in the total number of reports submitted, but serious and high harm events increased. The most frequently reported event continues to be Error Related to Procedure/Treatment/Test followed by Complication of Procedure/Treatment/Test, Medication Error, and Fall.

Patients and healthcare providers rely on devices that use artificial intelligence or machine learning in diagnostics, treatment, and monitoring. This study utilizes adverse event reports submitted to the FDA's Manufacturer and Use Facility Device Experience (MAUDE) database for machine learning-enabled devices. Mammography was implicated in 69% of reports, and the majority were near-miss events.

Community pharmacies face unique challenges in ensuring patient safety. This commentary summarizes research on prescribing errors in community pharmacies and how a culture of safety in community pharmacies can drive improvements in prescribing safety.

Mandatory error reporting systems can help identify types, causes, and solutions to medication-related errors. More than 30,000 medication-related incidents were reported by community pharmacists to the Assurance and Improvement in Medication (AIMS) Program in Canada. Event type, severity, medication class, and method of detection are described. Only 60% of pharmacies submitted at least one report, indicating compliance with and participation in the AIMS Program remains low.

Reporting adverse events and lessons learned can help improve patient safety beyond the original impacted facility, but low-quality reports can hinder learning. This study describes the quality of reports submitted during the first three years of England’s mandatory Learning from Deaths (LfD) program. While up to half of National Health Service (NHS) hospital trusts submitted data for all six regulatory statutes, a small minority did not submit any data. Three years in, the identification, reporting, and investigation of deaths has improved, but evidence of improved patient safety is still lacking.

In 2017, England’s National Health Service (NHS) implemented the Learning from Deaths program which requires NHS Secondary Care Trusts (NSCT) to report, investigate, and learn from potentially preventable deaths. This study focuses on what NCSTs learned during the first three years of the program, the actions taken in response and their impact, and engagement with Learning from Deaths. Trusts appear to have varied understanding and use of the term ‘learning’ and not all specified the impact their actions had on patient safety.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plays an important role in ensuring the safety of medical devices. In this cross-sectional study, researchers identified a high risk of future Class 1 FDA recall (the most serious recall designation, indicating serious risks to patient safety) among previously authorized devices (predicates) with prior Class 1 recalls.

Patients with developmental disabilities may be at higher risk for patient safety events in hospitals. This study used data from the Learning from Lives and Deaths (LeDeR) program in the UK to examine the prevalence of five avoidable in-hospital safety events. Compared to the general populations, patients with developmental disabilities experienced more patient safety incidents, longer length of stay and increased risk of death. Although the data did not include the causes of the incidents, the results support improving both inpatient and community care for persons with developmental disabilities.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) provides individual and composite quality and safety ratings (i.e., star ratings) for hospitals and other healthcare facilities on its Care Compare website. This study evaluated three alternative methods for rating facilities and compared them to the CMS star ratings. Hospitals were frequently assigned a different star rating using the alternate methods, typically between adjacent star categories.

Unintentionally retained surgical items (RSI) can have a devastating impact on patient health and safety. One method to reduce the incidence of RSI is radiofrequency (RF) detection. Nearly one million operations in New York state were analyzed for the rate of RSI before and after the use of RF was required and simultaneous TeamSTEPPS training was provided. The incidence of RF-detectable items was significantly reduced, but the rate of non-RF-detectable items was not.

All nursing homes certified by the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services (CMS) are required to submit select patient safety data which is used to calculate quality ratings. This study compared seven years of self-reported pressure ulcer data with claims-based data for pressure ulcer-related hospital admissions. Similar to earlier research on self-reported falls data, correlations between the self-reported and claims-based data was poor. The authors suggest alternate methods of data collection may provide the public with more accurate patient safety information.

Patients with chronic or complex healthcare needs are at increased risk of adverse events such as rehospitalization. This paper describes the development of quality measures to assess the safety and quality of primary care for patients with complex care needs at high risk of hospitalization or death. The expert panel proposed three categories (assessment, management, features of healthcare), 15 domains, and 49 concepts.