This initative defines competency domains for safe health care and outlines educational practices to achieve them. The 2nd edition of the Patient Safety Competencies was released in 2020. 

COVID-19 has increased uncertainties in sectors across health care. This article discusses a variety of supply-chain factors that impact medication availability. The author suggests roles for pharmacists in antibiotic stewardship and policy implementation to manage shortages safely.

This newly issued follow up to the seminal AHRQ Making Health Care Safer report (first published in 2001 and updated in 2013 critically examines the evidence supporting 47 separate patient safety practices chosen for the high-impact harms they address. It includes diagnostic errors, failure to rescue, sepsis, infections due to multi-drug resistant organisms, adverse drug events and nursing-sensitive conditions. The report discusses the evidence on cross-cutting safety practices, including safety culture, teamwork and team training, clinical decision support, patient and family engagement, cultural competency, staff education and training, and monitoring, audit and feedback. The report provides recommendations for clinicians and decision-makers on effective patient safety practices.

High-alert medications have the potential to cause serious patient harm if not administered correctly. Reporting on challenges to medication safety in the context of home, hospital, and cancer care, this news article recommends patient and health care professional education and support for collaboration with pharmacists as avenues for improvement.

Having family members or patient advocates present during hospitalizations can help prevent errors. This newsletter article suggests that utilizing this risk prevention strategy in peripheral care areas such as radiology and other testing units could also prevent patient harm. Recommendations to ensure success of this approach include communicating with advocates, encouraging them to speak up, and activating a rapid response to patient deterioration.

Disrespectful and unprofessional behaviors are a common problem in health care. The report examines cultural issues at a National Health Service trust that affected the transparency needed to report disruptive behaviors and that limited conversation needed to facilitate local actions and improvement. Recommendations for the leadership, organizational, and system levels are provided to enable constructive change.

Pediatric cardiac surgery is highly technical and risky. This newspaper article reports on a poorly performing pediatric cardiac surgery program, concerns raised by staff, and insufficient response from organizational leadership. Lack of data transparency, insufficient resources, and limited program capabilities to support a complex program contributed to poor outcomes for pediatric patients.

This commentary describes how one health system worked to combat resistance to change associated with implementation of a checklist initiative. The success of the program was built on empowering team members to drive the process, clinician motivation to provide safe care, and engaging leadership. A PSNet interview with Lucian Leape discussed surgical safety checklists.

Nuisance alarms, interruptions, and insufficient staff availability can hinder effective monitoring and response to acute patient deterioration. This news article reports on how hospital logistics centers are working toward utilizing artificial intelligence to improve clinician response to alarms by proactively identifying hospitalized patients at the highest risk for heart failure to trigger emergency response teams when their condition rapidly declines.

Physical demands and technical complexities can affect surgical safety. This resource is designed to capture frontline perceptions of surgeons in the United Kingdom regarding concerning behaviors exhibited by their peers during practice to facilitate awareness of problems, motivate improvement, and enable learning.

Medication safety officers serve as organizational champions of medication management process improvement. This news article offers two examples of health care organizations that positioned medication safety officers as leaders in their systems. The piece describes improvements stemming from employment of medication safety officers at these organizations.

Aviation continues to provide inspiration for patient safety innovation. This commentary describes a 10-minute team huddle exercise which involves team members rating their own mood status and the leader asking if there are any contextual concerns. In addition, two team members select "knowledge cards" that either test the person's knowledge or assign the person to proactively watch for improvement opportunities during the shift. The results encouraged sharing, situational awareness, and team building.

Collaboratives are a recognized strategy to support large-scale improvement. This program works to apply a framework for measuring and monitoring patient safety innovation and outcomes throughout a cohort of Canadian hospitals to foster new improvement strategies.

Reporting on the importance of a supportive workplace environment that engages employees in tasks to help ensure safety, this news article discusses root causes for low staff morale in the laboratory environment and suggests tactics to build healthy staff relationships.

This report provides preliminary outcome data from a six-cohort collaborative that used the comprehensive unit-based safety program and associated tools to prevent catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI). The early data show a decrease in the overall rate of CAUTI, with a more striking decrease in non-intensive care unit settings than in ICU settings.