Delayed referrals from primary care providers to specialty care can lead to delayed diagnoses and patient harm. This retrospective analysis examined differences in timely versus delayed referrals for urgent skin cancer evaluations at one institution. Among 320 referrals occurring in 2018, 38% of evaluations occurred 31 days or more after the referral and nearly 11% of referrals were never completed. Delayed referrals were more common among patients who did not speak English and racial/ethnic minorities.

Hospitals that implement quality improvement initiatives improve patient safety but also incur financial expenses related to implementation, sustainment, and reporting. This study used data from the American Hospital Association and Hospital Compare to evaluate the relationship of financial performance and quality in hospitals performing cardiac surgery. The findings indicate hospitals with lower Patient Safety Indicator 90 (PSI 90) scores had poorer financial performance in the following year.

Tablet-splitting may introduce patient safety risks, such as unpredictable dosing. This systematic review and qualitative synthesis did not identify substantive evidence to support tablet-splitting concerns, with the exception of sustained-release tablets and use by older adults who may struggle to split tablets due to physical limitations.

The rapid expansion of digital health technologies, particularly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, can increase patient safety risks. This article summarizes malpractice liability risks associated with digital health technologies, including electronic health record (EHR) systems, telehealth, and artificial intelligence for clinical decision support.

Debriefing is used to enhance individual and team communication and to facilitate real-time learning opportunities after a critical event. This study evaluated a charge nurse-facilitated clinical debriefing program used in Emergency Departments (EDs) in Alberta, Canada. Qualitative analyses identified several themes underscoring the impact of the debriefing program – the impacts on clinical practice and patient care, impacts on psychological safety and teamwork, stress management, and the emotional acknowledgement after critical events – and barriers to debriefing.

The CancelRx tool is designed to improve communication between electronic health record (EHR) systems and pharmacy dispensing software. However, interoperability issues can limit the tool’s usefulness and result in inadvertent dispensing of discontinued medications. This evaluation of discontinued medications at one health systems over a one-month period found that only one-third to one-half of discontinued medications were e-prescribed using the same EHR system and would result in a CancelRx message to the pharmacy; the remainder of discontinued medications were patient-reported or reconciled from outside sources.

Successful quality improvement (QI) initiatives should encourage change at the individual, team, and organizational levels. The authors of this article summarize the “self-limiting cascade” of quality improvement approaches, whereby QI programs prioritize process-technical strengths (e.g., quality metrics, “zero harm” goals) over participants’ emotional experience and sociotechnical design elements, which can ultimately hinder program performance.

Structured tools are increasingly used to identify diagnostic errors and related harms using electronic health record data. In this study, researchers compared the performance of two validated tools (Safer Dx and the DEER taxonomy) to identify diagnostic errors among patients with preventable or non-preventable deaths. Findings indicate that diagnostic errors and diagnostic process failures contributing to death were higher in preventable deaths (56%) but were also present in non-preventable deaths (17%).

In response to concerns about workplace violence (WPV) directed at healthcare workers in the US, the Joint Commission issued a Sentinel Event Alert and recommendations to increase organizational awareness of this risk. This study evaluated the effect of one of those recommendations, a WPV-reporting culture, on nurses’ burnout and patient safety. As anticipated, WPV increased nurse burnout, but unexpectedly, a strong WPV-reporting culture also increased the negative effect of WPV on burnout.

Safety culture has been shown to be associated with nursing home quality indicators such as discharge to community and injuries related to falls and catheters. Numerous surveys exist to measure safety culture. This review identified seven measurement tools, and the most frequently used tool was the Nursing Home Survey on Patient Safety Culture. The Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture, Safety Attitudes Questionnaire, and Modified Stanford Patient Safety Culture Survey Instrument were also used.

Research into the impact of racism on health outcomes has increased in recent years, but there has been less emphasis on ageism or the intersection of ageism and racism. This commentary highlights the ways racism (e.g., clinical algorithms), ageism (e.g., proposed measures to ration care) and the intersection of the two (increased morbidity and mortality of COVID-19 on older people of color) impacts health outcomes. Recommendations for current clinicians and health profession educators are provided.

AORN revised its Guideline for prevention of unintentionally retained surgical items in late 2021. This article focuses on concepts and recommendations specific to counting procedures, reconciling discrepancies, technology, and education.

COVID-19 changed the way care is delivered to hospitalized patients and resulted in new categories and themes in patient safety reporting. This study used machine learning to group of more than 2,000 patient safety event (PSE) reports into eight clinically relevant themes, including testing delays, diagnostic errors, pressure ulcers, and falls.

Patient safety research on inpatient psychiatric care is expanding, but less is known about outpatient mental health patient safety. This review of safety in community-based mental health services revealed several challenges, including defining preventable safety events. Additionally, safety research has focused on harm caused by the patient instead of harm caused by mental health services, such as delays in access or diagnosis.