Based on analysis of four years of data submitted to the Child Health Patient Safety Organization (CHILDPSO), researchers sought to identify types of serious safety events and contributing factors. Three main groups of serious safety events were identified: patient care management, procedural errors, and product or device errors. Contributing factors included lack of situational awareness, process failures, and failure to communicate effectively.

Constrained diagnostic situations in the emergency department (ED), such as crowding, can impact safe care. Based on multiple years of electronic health record data from one ED at a large U.S. hospital, researchers found that providers were significantly less likely to prescribe opioids during constrained diagnostic situations and less likely to prescribe opioids to high-risk patients or racial/ethnic minorities.

Health information technology has the potential to improve patient safety in both inpatient and outpatient settings. This systematic review explored the effect of technology networks across health systems (e.g., linking patient records across different organizations) on care coordination and medication reconciliation for older adults living at home. The authors identified several barriers to use of such networks but did not identify robust evidence on their association with safety-related outcomes.

Antimicrobial stewardship is one strategy to improve antibiotic use to reduce hospital-acquired infections. In this editorial, the authors discuss negative effects of COVID-19 on antimicrobial resistance and antibiotic stewardship in the emergency department (ED) and approaches for optimizing ED stewardship during the pandemic.  

This position statement shares 11 recommendations drawn from a review of the evidence to improve the safety of pediatric dosing in pre-hospital emergent situations. Suggestions for improvement include use of kilograms as the standard unit of weight, pre-calculated weight-based dosing, and dose-derivation strategies to minimize use of calculations in real time.   

This systematic review explored how artificial intelligence (AI) based on machine learning algorithms and natural language processing is used to address and report patient safety outcomes. The review suggests that AI-enabled decision support systems can improve error detection, patient stratification, and drug management, but that additional evidence is needed to understand how well AI can predict safety outcomes.  

This study compared medication errors detected using incident reports, the Global Trigger Tool method, and direct observations of patient records. Incident reports and the Global Trigger Tool more commonly identified medication errors likely to cause harm. Omission errors were commonly identified by all three methods, but identification of other errors varied. For example, incident reports most commonly identified wrong dose and wrong time errors. The contributing factors also varied by method, but in general, communication issues and human factors were the most common contributors.

This study evaluated cross-sectional survey data from pharmacists and patients to characterize organizational factors associated with variation in safety climate, patient satisfaction and self-reported medication adherence in community pharmacies in the United Kingdom. Safety climate was associated with pharmacy ownership, organizational culture, working hours, and employment of accuracy checkers. Skill mix and continuity of care also influenced safety culture and quality.

This retrospective study used descriptive statistics, manual analysis, and text mining of medication-related incident reports and staffing (N = 72,390) in England and Wales. The text mining was conducted with SAS Text Minor tool.  Effective trigger terms included “short staffing”, “workload”, and “extremely busy”.  The authors concluded that inadequate staffing, workload, and working in haste may increase the risk for errors.  The key importance of this article is the use of an automated system to analyze incident reports.

Reducing opioid prescribing in pain management is a key strategy to address the opioid crisis. This review highlights the unique role of the anesthesiologist in this approach. The authors emphasize preoperative identification of patients at risk for long-term opioid use and suggest organizational, clinical, and research strategies that can be led by anesthesiologists to reduce opioid use.

In this retrospective analysis of Medicaid claims, researchers found that opioid medications are often discontinued abruptly, presumably for safety reasons. Nearly half of patients who had opioids suddenly discontinued or with short tapering lengths experienced an opioid-related emergency department visit and hospitalization, suggesting an unintended consequence of reducing opioid use.

Patients with chronic pain can experience unintended consequences related to prescription limitation policies implemented to address the opioid epidemic. This commentary offers insights from primary care providers and regulators regarding the difficulty of managing opioid prescriptions to limit misuse while effectively treating pain.