Medical lines, such as intravenous (IV), oxygen, or feeding tubes, provide lifesaving support but may also pose safety threats. Following a 2022 Food and Drug Administration safety communication regarding risk of strangulation by feeding tubes, researchers sought to determine if pediatric healthcare providers and caregivers were aware of the risk of medical line entanglement, and what, if any, type of education was provided to reduce the risk. Most providers were aware of the risk of entanglement, and 90% of caregivers reported their child had become entangled. However, less than 10% of caregivers received training to prevent such entanglements. Numerous comments from caregivers are provided, describing instances of entanglements and strategies they’ve used to prevent it.

Provision of enteral nutrition (EN) is a specialized process requiring careful interdisciplinary teamwork. After discovering significant issues with ordering, administration, and documentation of EN, this health system updated its workflows to improve safety. EN therapies were added to the electronic medication administration record (MAR) and the barcoding system was updated. After one year, all EN orders were barcode scanned and nearly all were documented as given or included a reason why they were not given.

Mistakes in hospital dietary services can contribute to allergic reactions and patient malnourishment. This guidance shares an improvement approach to care environment food provision that considers clinical concerns and patient limitations as steps toward enhancing patient care.

Enteral nutrition is provided to patients in a variety of care settings, and errors in the enteral nutrition–use process may lead to safety hazards. Drawing from current evidence, these consensus guidelines recommend best practices to ensure safety of enteral nutrition, including a six-step standardized approach to administering eternal nutrition that involves independent double-checks and automation with forcing functions.

This commentary explores elements of the hospital environment that can contribute to sleep deprivation and malnutrition in patients, including care complexity, hospital census, poor communication, and noise. The authors advocate for designing more patient-centered hospital systems to prevent this type of harm.

Previous studies have explored safety issues related to parenteral nutrition processes, but problems associated with general nutrition for inpatients have received scant attention. This commentary advocates for promoting awareness around malnutrition as a hospital-acquired condition and outlines 12 actions to improve the safety of nutrition care for hospitalized patients, including use of routine assessments and checklists.

Parenteral nutrition has the potential to result in patient harm if administered or prepared incorrectly. This commentary builds on a set of overarching recommendations to define competencies that enable the safe prescribing and delivery of parenteral nutrition. The model is designed to help organizations apply the suggestions in their particular care environments.

This commentary describes strategies to promote the use of parenteral nutrition safety guidelines in practice. The authors include examples of how checklists can improve adoption of best practices and discuss the potential for instituting policies and providing information about drug shortages to drive integration of the recommendations into daily work.

Approximately 1 in 60 prescriptions for parenteral nutrition resulted in a medication error, most of which occurred at the preparation or administration stages.

This review surveys information on enteral nutrition administration and tubing misconnections and recommends employing increased standards and forcing functions to reduce their incidence.