Clinician burnout has become a major concern for both healthcare workforce and patient safety. This portal provides access to tools to support organizational efforts to address the latent factors contributing to burnout such as well-being assessments and mental health access for clinicians improvement strategies.

This website provides access to an annual report that summarizes National Health Service hospital and social care performance across a range of care quality metrics at both the trust and service level. The 2022-2023 report found substantial weaknesses in specialty areas such as emergency and maternal care and recognized workforce wellbeing issues that impact access and quality.

Large-scale data analysis provides insights to generate evidence-based improvement action. This collection of reports provides access to investigations of the impact of healthcare-related harm events in Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) programs and across the United States health system. This set of publications not only examines weaknesses but provides recommendations for improvement on topics such as gaps in fall reporting by home health agencies, Medicare adverse events and the viability of payment incentives as a strategy for medical harm reduction.

Drawing from data reported by the Leapfrog Hospital Survey, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), this website provides grades for hospitals in the United States based on their safety. The Fall 2023 hospital safety grade results, documenting a reduction in both patient satisfaction scores and healthcare associated infection rates to pre-pandemic levels, are available. 

Reducing preventable harm associated with health care is a worldwide goal. This Canadian initiative developed a measure to track unintended harm in acute care hospitals, a toolkit to accompany reduction efforts, and reports that assess the results of improvement efforts and provide data analysis.

AHRQ supports the development and testing of various resources for health care organizations to implement as safety improvement strategies. This collection of case studies highlights AHRQ-funded patient safety tools, including the Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program, Re-Engineered Discharge Toolkit, and patient safety culture surveys, to document their successful use in the field.

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, achieving health equity, and preventing hospital-acquired infections, medication errors, inpatient suicide, and specific clinical harms such as falls and pressure ulcers. The 2024 goals are now available.

Independent investigations examine system weaknesses in health care to inform improvement, reduce risk, and prevent harm. This organization -- formally known as the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch or HSIB -- collects information from individuals, groups, and organizations to identify and analyze incidents of substandard care and to proactively provide recommendations to reduce conditions that perpetuate failure in the National Health Service. Investigation areas include medication delivery for older patients and safe maternity care.

This annual report summarizes never events in Maryland hospitals over the previous year. During fiscal year 2022, reported events increased due to the COVID pandemic, workforce shortages and other system demands. Events contributing to patient deaths and severe harm from preventable medical errors during the time period doubled. The authors recommend several corrective actions to enhance improvement work, including board and executive leadership engagement in safety work and application of high-reliability concepts to enhance safety culture.

The Speak Up campaign provides sets of materials to enable patients and families to engage in making their health care experiences as safe as possible. Topics covered include safe surgery, pain management, medication safety, and most recently, how preventive care helps to keep patients healthy and out of the hospital. Each topical package includes infographics, videos, and distribution guidance. Some written materials are available in Spanish.

The sharing of best practices is a key component of enabling successful strategy implementation in support of patient safety plans and goals. This website will capture, organize, and share experiences worldwide to support knowledge sharing and community building to reduce World Patient Safety Day targeted challenges.

Organizational efforts to collect and respond to the concerns of staff and patients are a cornerstone to patient safety improvement despite challenges to implement them. This annual report presents insights drawn from problems staff share with Freedom to Speak Up Guardians in the United Kingdom to capitalize on problems to drive improvement. The 2023 report summarized data collected from over 25,000 cases recorded.

This site provides promotional materials and registration information for an awareness campaign on patient safety that takes place in the autumn. The annual observance will take place October 23-27, 2023.

The Eisenberg Award honors individuals and organizations who have made key contributions to patient safety and quality improvement. The awards are presented at the National Quality Forum's annual policy conference in Washington, DC. This website provides information on all the recipients and the application process. The 2023 award submission cycle is open through August 21, 2023. 

The AHRQ Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs) represent quality measures that make use of a hospital's available administrative data. The PSIs reflect the quality of inpatient care but also focus on preventable complications and iatrogenic events. Investigators have found PSIs to be a useful tool for understanding adverse events and identifying possible areas of improvement within health care delivery systems. Although relying on administrative data has clear limitations, select PSIs have been shown to accurately identify certain accidental inpatient injuries. The AHRQ Web site offers publicly available comparative data, along with resources and tools. Patient safety measurement methods are discussed in an AHRQ WebM&M perspective. Originally released in 2005, the PSI were most recently updated in August 2023.

Effective teamwork plays an essential role in providing safe patient care. The Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS) program was developed inititally in collaboration by the United States Department of Defense and AHRQ in order to support effective communication and teamwork in health care. The 3.0 version of the widely implemented program is organized around 5 key strategies: patient focus, integrated platform, modular course design, active adult learning and emergent team challenges and opportunities. It provides new tools to measure its impact, supports increased emphasis on the role of patients in teams, and includes a new pocket guide. A PSNet WebM&M commentary discussed how improved teamwork and shared decision-making might have prevented a missed diagnosis of sepsis that lead to the death of a patient.

Communication and Resolution Programs (CRP) are a promising strategy for managing the aftermath of medical harm. This 18-month learning collaborative will help participants engage leadership, implement CRP processes, build patient partnerships and establish measurement approaches to gauge the success of CRP efforts. Applications for the 2023-2024 December start cohort will be accepted until October 27, 2023.

Ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) are increasingly being used to provide surgical care. The AHRQ Surveys on Patient Safety Culture™ (SOPS®) Ambulatory Surgery Center Survey seeks opinions from the field regarding safety culture in the ambulatory surgical center environment. The survey is presented with additional resources to help organizations assess their safety culture, including the results of a pilot program testing the survey and a user's guide. Voluntary data submission will be open June 1-22 for ASCs that have administered the survey.

This global initiative raises awareness about hand hygiene as a strategy to reduce health care–associated infections. The initiative highlights Save Lives: Clean Your Hands, an annual promotional campaign that takes place on May 5. The theme for 2023 is "Accelerate action together".