Improving patient safety is a global goal. This literature review explored patient safety interventions focused on people living in fragile, conflict-affected, and vulnerable settings. Studies were generally from lower and lower-middle income countries and focused primarily on strengthening infection prevention and control; however, there is a call for more attention on providing patient safety training to healthcare workers, introducing risk management tools, and reducing preventable harm during care delivery.

The OpenNotes concept is positioned  to increase patient engagement in their care through error correction and communication enhancement. This commentary highlights concerns associated with privacy involving certain conditions and patient groups that participate in open notes programs. The authors provide recommendations to ensure safety while enabling effective information sharing with all patient populations.

Adverse events can contribute to physical, financial, or emotional harm. Based on radiology-related events identified in a hospital incident reporting system, the authors identified the types of incidents contributing to emotional harm in patients – failure to be patient-centered, disrespectful communication, privacy violations, minimization of patient concerns, and loss of property. The authors also proposed several improvement strategies, including communication training and improvement of communication processes, individual feedback, and improvements to existing processes and systems.

Cybersecurity risks in healthcare settings can threaten patient safety. This article outlines the value of a Clinical Director of Cybersecurity, representing a partnership between security-educated clinicians and security professionals. This individual would support development of an effective cybersecurity program through cyber awareness, hygiene (i.e., practices to reduce security risk), management, and cyber-incident response.

Ensuring research participants’ confidentiality is of paramount importance to conducting patient safety research. This article explores how confidentiality is presented in informed consent templates, as compared to current case law in Canada and the United States. Researchers should continue to reassure participants that attempts to force disclosure of confidential research information are rarely successful, and describe the steps taken to protect their confidentiality.

Planned and unplanned electronic heath record (EHR) downtime can have a negative effect on patient safety. This commentary recommends training and education for frontline healthcare workers to help manage cybersecurity attacks in health care. Interventions should be simple and easy to implement and could be based on lessons learned in other areas of patient safety, such as hand hygiene.

Patient safety is an emerging focus within the mental health field. Using qualitative methods, the authors explored environmental influences on patient perceptions of safety in acute mental health settings. Participants highlighted the importance of staff presence, privacy, feeling safe from other patients, and access to meaningful activities (such as meaningful time alone or structured activities).  

Learning from adverse events is a core component of patient safety improvement. These authors developed guidance for the use of peer review protected information (such as voluntary event reports and root causes analyses) in safety research. The guidance aims to ensure that data are handled safely and appropriately while supporting scientific discovery.  

Artificial intelligence (AI) is seen as a transformative technology for data application, decision making, and research. This commentary summarizes issues surrounding widespread use of AI in health care, such as integration into clinical workflow, data standardization, and patient safety.

A privacy breach is a type of patient harm. Investigators collected a large volume of recycled paper waste from multiple hospitals and found protected health information that should have been disposed of in a more secure fashion. The authors suggest systems approaches to avoid privacy breaches related to paper medical records.

Electronic health records (EHRs) and health information technologies (IT) have been widely implemented to enhance safe care delivery, despite weaknesses linked to systems and user experience. This review explores the evidence on health IT implementation and design challenges that have hindered progress, recommends ways to address these issues, and highlights the potential benefits if EHRs are fully utilized.

This survey of participants in the 100,000 Lives Campaign provides an overview of oversight of quality improvement initiatives and the ethical considerations involved in conducting quality improvement research.

Providing patient-centered care continues to be a goal in both clinical settings and from a systems standpoint. While single-patient rooms have been associated with patients feeling safer, there is some debate about whether patients' satisfaction equates to their safety. This commentary advocates for single-patient rooms as a method to become more patient-centered, increase patient satisfaction, and reduce the incidence of nosocomial infections. The authors also point out important considerations with such a strategy, including costs and potential changes in workflow and related processes. However, they conclude that efforts at hospital design could have greater impact on patient safety and satisfaction than efforts at changing hospital culture.