To protect children and pets from accidental exposure to prescription medications, this consumer alert outlines the dangers of inappropriate storage and disposal of medication skin patches.

Insulin use errors are common despite their heightened potential for patient harm. This announcement highlights labeling and storage practices to reduce dispensing and administration errors associated with individual insulin pen use.    

Accidental misuse of prescription opiates for pain can result in addiction, overdose and death. This announcement outlines new federal labeling requirements for opiates and treatments for opioid use disorder. The FDA calls for health care professionals to educate patients about naloxone when prescribing opioid medications to improve the safety of patients taking opiates.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) support transparency through the provision of publicly available information on the quality of health care service in the United States. This portal enables access to comparative quality and safety data from doctors & clinicians, hospital, nursing home, home health, hospice, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, long-term care hospitals, and dialysis facilities to support informed consumer health care provider selection activities.

Misuse of prescription opiates in the US continues to be a patient safety concern.  This data brief summarizes characteristics of the Medicare Part D population that routinely use opiates. It provides insights into the prevalence of patients diagnosed with opioid use disorders and others at risk for abuse that receive prescriptions for opioids.  A recommendation shared to address the situation is to assure patients diagnosed with the disorder get the medication-assisted treatment they need.

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.

In light of the current opioid crisis, the use of opioids to manage noncancer-related chronic pain in the ambulatory environment has been targeted for improvement. This AHRQ-funded initiative offers a six-element multidisciplinary redesign approach that highlights areas such as leadership development, prescription monitoring, and care planning.

The opioid crisis is a persisting patient safety problem. One approach to prevent misuse of opioids is to raise awareness of the addictive nature of the medication. This national campaign enlists communities and individual clinicians to provide patient education to address the opioid epidemic. The website offers videos and other resources to assist community-level efforts to reduce risk for opioid addiction.

Standard term selection tools—like pick lists or drop-down menus—in information technology can create opportunities for user error due to human factors. This publication explores how mistakes such as selecting the wrong drug from an ordering pick list can occur in the ambulatory environment. The report includes recommendations and resources to help enhance medication safety when using these tools.

Overdoses of opioid medications are considered an epidemic in the United States. This website provides access to various resources for hospitals and clinicians to help them address this patient safety concern as part of a larger collection of materials related to the effective use of health information technology. Sections include guidelines, clinical decision support, electronic prescribing, and prescription drug monitoring programs.

Standardization has been embraced as a strategy to improve health literacy and to reduce patient misunderstanding of medication instructions. This tool provides standard language that clarifies directions for patients regarding when they should take their medications.

Children are often prescribed oral liquid medications due to difficulty swallowing tablets or capsules. This Web site provides resources for an initiative to standardize concentrations of pediatric oral liquid drugs to reduce inconsistencies that lead to medication errors.

This announcement describes a labeling change designed to prevent calculation errors associated with heparin, a high-alert medication.

This announcement raises awareness of risks associated with children accidentally ingesting over-the-counter eye drops and nasal sprays.

This Web site raises awareness of risks associated with buying medications from online pharmacies and offers resources to help identify whether an online pharmacy is safe or fake.

In this video, a pediatrician describes tips for teaching older children how to take medicine safely.

This announcement explains the potential for medication errors due to a discrepancy between dosing instructions and dosing dispenser measurement units for the drug Tamiflu.

This AHRQ grantee announcement lists 13 projects funded to demonstrate effective strategies in identifying and addressing risks and in improving processes in ambulatory care.

This Web page provides summaries of and links to the various trigger tools available from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement to use in identifying adverse events.