Leadership commitment is crucial to attaining sustainable improvement in patient safety. This “Declaration to Advance Patient Safety” call-to-action shares three steps to motivate work toward implementing change to enhance safe care. First, commit to a national plan for improvement. Second, identify and empower a senior leader and team to assess an organization’s existent safety status. Third, devise plans to measure, design, implement, and support adverse event reduction initiatives.

Hospital crisis management, preparation, and planning are of heightened interest due to the COVID-19 emergency. This assessment tool examines hospital readiness for the patient surge due to the pandemic. The assessment tool helps organizations examine support structures, monitoring, infection control, supply and space capabilities, and staff support mechanisms to proactively address concerns to prepare for future challenges.

This National Action Plan developed by the National Steering Committee for Patient Safety – a group of 27 national organizations convened by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement – provides direction for health care leaders and organizations to implement and adapt effective tactics and supportive actions to establish the recommendations laid out in the plan. Its areas of focus include culture, leadership, and governance, patient and family engagement, workforce safety and learning systems.  

The rapidly evolving response to the COVID-19 pandemic is enhanced through the sharing of data, information, and knowledge. This series of webinars moderated by Dr. Don Berwick and Derek Feeley, CEO, cover a range of topics to disseminate experience from the field and encourage learning. Topics covered include telemedicine, crisis standards of care, and response implementation.

Maternal care safety is challenged by operational, public health and individual provider limitations. The report outlines specific areas of concern for rural hospitals and suggests avenues for improvement. Strategies suggested using simulation to prepare staff and training on implicit bias.

The measurement of patient safety is a persistent challenge across the health care continuum. This webinar summarizes a set of 8 foundations to guide patient safety measurement improvement that include capitalizing data in real time and engaging patients in the measurement process. Speakers included Dr. Donald Berwick and Helen Haskell.