Efforts to embed patient safety content into defined post-graduate medical curriculum face challenges due to time, culture, and program resource demands. This statement provides detailed safety and quality content recommendations for maternal-fetal medicine fellows that focus on topics such as safety culture, event reporting, and disparities.

Racism is increasingly seen as a major contributor to poor maternal care and adverse outcomes. This article summarizes racial health disparities impacting patients in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and interventions to reduce racial bias in the NICU.

Safe obstetrical care can be compromised by a variety of controllable risk factors, such as communication between providers. To reduce preventable adverse events, interprofessional obstetric teams (physicians and midwives) in one hospital received training on the importance of team communication. Compared to the year before the training, there was a significantly significant reduction in diagnostic errors and inadequate birth position, but not in other categories.

Structural racism contributes to high rates of severe maternal morbidity (SMM) experienced by Black patients. This study investigated specific measures of structural racism (incarceration inequality and racialized economic segregation) on Black SMM. In this sample of births from 2008-2011, racialized economic segregation was associated with SMM for black patients; however, incarceration inequality was not.

Severe maternal morbidity (SMM) is an international public health concern and the focus of hospital quality improvement activities. This article describes the development of a performance SMM (pSMM) that can be used to quantify potentially preventable, hospital-acquired SMM. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) SMM measure was adapted and results are stratified by hospital type.

Patient engagement in healthcare is widely encouraged, but findings from some studies suggest that patient participation can have negative effects. This qualitative study with 16 patients and obstetric healthcare professionals examined the negative effects of patient participation in healthcare. Researchers identified four types of negative consequences from patient participation in safety – decreases in patient confidence, eroding of the patient-professional relationship, unwanted increases in patient responsibility, and excess time spent by professionals on the patient.

Effective teamwork is critical for patient safety and numerous training strategies exist for improving team dynamics. The labor and delivery unit of an American hospital offered Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS) training to all physicians and nurses on the ward, and assessed perceptions of teamwork and safety both before and six months after training. Results were mixed, and physician and nurse perceptions of safety significantly differed.

The demand for, and acceptance of, telemedicine solutions to provide services has grown substantially in recent years as safety profiles for the services are being defined. This guideline examines its use in pregnancy-related care, discusses the benefits and suggests actions to ensure patient safety during these encounters such as development of appropriate metrics and methods for vital-sign monitoring.

Maternal near misses are associated with lower quality of life and poorer outcomes for the pregnant person and their family. In this study, 12 Black women who experienced a maternal near miss describe major contributors. They list communication problems, such as not being believed, their relationship with their provider, and provider discrimination as major contributors.

Structural racism, from race-adjusted algorithms to biased machine learning, contributes to and exacerbates health inequities. This commentary calls for developing valid measures of structural racism and a publicly available data infrastructure for researchers. A related study examined the relationship between structural racism and birth outcomes between Black and white patients in Minnesota.

Obstetric and gynecologic (OB/GYN) physicians are frequently involved in malpractice lawsuits, some of which result in catastrophic payouts. This study categorized malpractice claims involving OB/GYN trainees (students, residents, and fellows) between 1986 and 2020. Cases are categorized by type of injury, patient outcome, category of error, outcome of lawsuit, and amount of settlement.

Normalization of deviance describes a situation where individuals, teams or organizations accept a lower standard of performance until that lower standard becomes the “norm” and can threaten patient safety. This article describes five serious medical errors in obstetrics and highlights how normalization of deviance contributed to each event.