Detailing results of an error reporting initiative in New Jersey, these reports explain how consumers can use this information and provides tips for safety when obtaining health care. A section highlights findings related to patient safety indicators.

This annual analysis explores rates of health care-associated infections (HAIs) reported in the United States. Data from 2020 revealed increases in central line–associated bloodstream infections and other infections while a decrease in surgical site infections. The current report also discusses the impact of COVID-19 on reporting and data submission efforts.

This annual report identified a significant number of medication errors associated with diabetes care in acute hospitals in England and Wales.

A vibrant culture of safety is critical to achieving high reliability in health care. Ambulatory practices with weaker safety cultures can experience problems in teamwork, diagnosis, and staff turnover. The AHRQ Medical Office Survey on Patient Safety Culture was designed to evaluate safety culture in outpatient clinics. The 2020 comparative database report assessed 10 safety culture domains in 1,475 medical offices. Respondents reported effective patient follow-up practices and scored well on equitable care delivery. Many practices cited time pressure and workload as persistent challenges to safety hazards. Although the practices surveyed are not nationally representative, they do provide a comparative safety culture snapshot for industry assessment. A past WebM&M commentary discussed safety hazards associated with productivity pressures in health care.

This organization highlights the importance of in-depth reporting and investigation of adverse events in labor and delivery, involving parents in the analysis, engaging external experts to gain broader perspectives about what occurred, and focusing on system factors that contribute to failures. A WebM&M commentary discusses how lapses in fetal monitoring can miss signs of distress that result in harm. The reporting initiative closed in 2021 after presenting its final report. Investigations in this area will now be undertaken by the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch in England.

Telehealth is becoming a standard care mechanism due to COVID-19 concerns. This special issue brief discusses telediagnosis, shares system and associate factors affecting its reliability, challenges in adopting this mode of practice, and areas of research needed to fully understand its impact. This issue brief is part of a series on diagnostic safety.

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.

One strategy to reduce the potential of opioid misuse is to limit access to unused medications in the home. Examining programs to safely collect unused prescription opioids for disposal and patient awareness and use of such programs, this report found that many adults are unaware these programs exist or choose to retain or sell unused prescription opioids rather than utilize safe disposal services.

Hospitalized patient suicide is a sentinel event. This report describes an investigation into a patient suicide incident in the Veterans Affairs health system that found numerous conditions that contributed to the event, such as nonoperational security cameras, ineffective rounding policy, and lack of leadership knowledge of safety practices in mental health units. Recommendations for improvement include staff education, standardization of rounding, and robust oversight of frontline practice.

The United Kingdom National Health Service (NHS) has been at the forefront of patient safety innovation. This strategy seeks to further implement approaches that explore and optimize the intersection of systems and human behaviors to support safe care at the NHS. The framework builds upon the perspectives of patients, staff, and organizations to achieve whole system improvement and sustain those changes through effective intervention and program design.

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.

The overprescribing of prescription opioids heightens the likelihood of opioid dependence and harm. This report shares data from 25 countries to provide a baseline for the current crisis. The publication illustrates the complexity of the opioid epidemic and suggests that system-focused multisector strategies are required to address the problem.

This draft 5-year framework aims to guide the activities in Canada to focus action, resources, and policy development on supporting care improvement. The document is structured around five goals: people-centered care, safe care, accessible care, appropriate care, and continuous care. The authors invited Canadian patients, families, clinicians, organization leaders, and policymakers to provide input on the material to ensure its applicability across the country. 

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality conducts safety culture surveys in a wide variety of clinical settings and makes the results publicly available on a regular basis. This report contains responses to the Community Pharmacy Survey on Patient Safety Culture from 331 participating pharmacies, most of which were chain drugstores or pharmacies within integrated health systems. The areas of strength were similar to the 2015 report, with most community pharmacies scoring well for patient counseling and openness of communication regarding unsafe situations. Inadequate staffing and production pressures were the commonly identified barriers to safety. A PSNet perspective explored safety issues in the community pharmacy setting in detail.

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.

Programs are in place to address hospital discharge process gaps that contribute to readmissions. This report summarizes research on primary care perspectives on reducing readmissions. Interventions identified include automated alerting to primary care providers when patients are hospitalized and the patient-centered medical home model.

Record matching problems can have serious clinical impacts on patients. This report explores how to optimize demographic data integrity to improve patient record matching, as identifying information is increasingly integrated into shared record keeping systems. The investigation determined strategies to improve matching such as implementing standard data formats and disseminating best practices.

Hospital-acquired conditions (HACs) represent a significant source of preventable harm to patients. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services financially penalizes hospitals with increased numbers of HACs through the Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program. This policy of nonpayment has prompted hospitals to focus significant resources on preventing HACs. This AHRQ report found a reduction in HACs from 99 per 1000 acute care discharges to 86 per 1000 discharges between 2014 and 2017, representing a decrease in 910,000 HACs and savings of $7.7 billion. Declines in certain HACs such as adverse drug events and Clostridium difficile infections were noted to be more significant as compared to others. A past WebM&M commentary highlighted the clinical significance of HACs and described an incident involving a patient who developed a pressure ulcer while in the hospital.