Resiliency and proactive safety behaviors can improve safety in the perioperative environment. In this article, the authors describe safety attitudes of perioperative staff after participating in a proactive activity, One Safe Act (OSA). Most participants reported the OSA activity would change their work practices, improve their work unit's ability to deliver safe care, and demonstrate their colleagues' commitment to patient safety.

Medication reconciliation has been shown to reduce medication errors but is a time-consuming process. This study compared medication reconciliation via a patient portal with those performed by a pharmacy technician (usual care). Medication discrepancies were similar between both groups, and patients were satisfied using the patient portal, which saved 6.8 minutes per patient compared with usual care.

Preoperative checklists and timeouts are common tools to improve patient safety. Over a 16-month period, this study purposefully and randomly introduced errors during preoperative timeouts for 1,800 procedures but only 54% of these errors were reported by operating team members. The authors suggest that future research should explore ways to improve the quality of surgical timeouts to reduce risks to patient safety.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically increased the use of telehealth across various medical specialties.This systematic review did not identify any differences in patient or surgeon satisfaction or patient-reported outcomes with telehealth for orthopedic care delivery as compared to in-person visits.However, the authors note that the included studies did not adequately capture or report safety endpoints, such as complications or missed diagnoses.

This study assessed the impact of combined use of two surgical safety checklists on morbidity, mortality, and length of stay – the Surgical Patient Safety System (SURPASS) is used to address preoperative and postoperative care, and the World Health Organization surgical safety checklist (WHO SSC) is used for perioperative care.  In addition to existing use of the WHO SSC, the SURPASS checklist was implemented in three surgical departments in one tertiary hospital in Norway. Results demonstrated that combined use of these checklists was associated with reduced complications reoperations, and readmissions, but combined use did not impact mortality or length of stay.

This commentary explores insights from the husband of a patient who died due to a medical error and his subsequent commitment to promote application of human factors engineering principles from the aviation industry to improve safety in health care organizations.

This pre-post study demonstrated increases in teamwork after introduction of an anesthesia checklist. Although evidence for checklists in real-world settings is mixed, this work demonstrates their efficacy as part of an intervention study, which is consistent with prior work.

Many institutions are attempting to increase patient and family engagement in safety efforts. This report on integrating parents of children undergoing surgery into the completion of the WHO surgical safety checklist provides a helpful example of families being successfully incorporated into an existing safety program.

This guideline describes recommendations for preoperative assessment of elderly surgical patients, including risk factors for postoperative delirium and pulmonary complications, to enhance safety and reduce readmissions.

Rapid response systems function within a variety of structures, but they ultimately remain a mechanism to manage a clinically deteriorating patient. This prospective study demonstrated that implementation of an intensivist physician and nurse–based team led to improvements in cardiac arrest rates and adjusted hospital mortality.

This AHRQ-funded study describes one organization’s efforts to detail its preoperative process around care transitions in order to highlight obstacles and areas for intervention.

The investigators reviewed claims data to identify cases in which patient mortality was related to anesthesia and found that algorithms, preoperative evaluation, training, education, and use of protocols might prevent such deaths.

The authors analyzed the patient transfer process from anesthetic room to operating room used in British hospitals and determined that it presents opportunities for risks to patient safety.