Maternal and newborn safety is challenged during cesarean delivery due to the complexities of the practice. This guideline recommends specific checklist elements to direct coordination and communication between the two teams engaged in cesarean deliveries. The guideline provides a sample checklist and steps for its implementation.

This document shares goals and objectives to enhance use of automated dispensing devices for pharmacists, other practitioners, and information system professionals.

The Joint Commission issues sentinel event alerts to raise awareness regarding risks in the health care setting. This alert highlights physical and verbal violence as a major problem in the workplace, particularly in areas such as the emergency department and inpatient psychiatric units. Other factors associated with violence in health care settings include stressful conditions, understaffing, and lack of organizational policies for recognizing and deescalating hostile behaviors. The alert suggests numerous strategies health care organizations can take to mitigate workplace violence, such as establishing systems across the organization that enable reporting of workplace violence and developing quality improvement initiatives to reduce such incidents. A past PSNet perspective explored how a team at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center developed a process to improve workplace safety.

Individuals involved in adverse maternal events require support both physically and emotionally. This guidance combines readiness, recognition, response, and reporting and systems-learning steps to aid birthing facility nurses and management in providing standardized help for mothers, families, and care team members that experience care-related harm.  

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.   

The over-prescribing of opioids is a recognized contributor to patient harm. This multidisciplinary panel developed six recommendations to manage pain after dental procedures while reducing harm to patients: (1) Offer alternatives to opioids after dental surgery to interested patients when clinically appropriate. (2) Avoid prescribing opioids after dental surgery if pain is comfortably management with over-the-counter medication. (3) Advise patients about non-pharmacological therapies (e.g., cold, heat, distraction). (4) Teach patients to maximize non-narcotic (over the counter) pain medication with scheduled dosing unless contraindicated. (5) Engage in shared decision-making with patients. (6) Consider factors such as medical contraindications, risk for addiction, and risk aversion when prescribing opioids.

This piece highlights the value of a medication safety leader in guiding error prevention efforts and outlines the responsibilities of such a role. Areas of focus include leadership, medication safety expertise, change management, research and education.

Pharmacists working with surgical teams bring distinct safety context, expertise, and process awareness to perioperative care. These guidelines outline how pharmacists can help reduce medication errors before, during, and after surgery. Perioperative pharmacists can enhance communication, medication histories, and process reliability.

Professionals have an ethical responsibility to seek assistance or amend their workload if they are unable to practice safely. This position paper summarizes five areas of focus to ensure physicians regain skills to practice safely after recovering from impairment. The authors highlight the need for the development of best practices to address these situations and encourage maintaining physician well-being as a professional priority.

The Beers criteria serve as standard guidance for clinicians to prevent potentially inappropriate prescribing in patients age 65 years and older. This update of the Beers criteria examined current evidence to determine changes required to keep the recommendations in step with current practice and knowledge. Nearly 70 modifications have been made to the 2015 set.

Potential deterioration of older surgeons' technical performance is a patient safety concern. This guidance developed from a Society of Surgical Chairs panel discussion puts forth several steps to manage the transition of aging surgeons. Recommendations include mandatory cognitive and psychomotor testing for surgeons age 65 and older, respectful consideration of the financial and emotional concerns of aging surgeons, and lifelong mentoring around the transition from clinical to nonclinical roles. The authors anticipate that such initiatives will prompt thoughtful support for aging surgeons that ensures patient safety. In an accompanying editorial, an older physician supports mandatory testing and suggests individual-level steps to address aging as a surgeon, including healthy lifestyle and financial habits.

Obstetrics is a high-risk practice that concurrently manages the safety of mothers and newborns. This commentary describes the importance of standardization, checklist use, auditing and feedback, peer coaching, and interdisciplinary communication as strategies to reduce risks. The discussion spotlights the need for national guidelines and definitions to reduce variation in auditing and training activities and calls for heightened engagement of health care professionals to improve the safety and quality of obstetric care in Canada. An Annual Perspective reviewed work on improving maternal safety.

This expert guidance provides recommendations to help health care facilities develop policies for preventing health care–associated infections in the operating room. The authors build on existing anesthesia safety practices to outline specific actions for infection prevention and control.