This piece explores the key role of emergency medical services in providing care to patients at their moment of greatest need, safety hazards in this field, and opportunities for improvement.

Dr. Bilimoria is the Director of the Surgical Outcomes and Quality Improvement Center of Northwestern University. He is the principal investigator of the Flexibility in Duty Hour Requirements for Surgical Trainees (FIRST) trial and a Faculty Scholar at the American College of Surgeons. We spoke with him about the FIRST trial, which examined how less restrictive duty hours affected patient outcomes and resident satisfaction. Its results informed recent changes to duty hour policies.

Prof. Needleman has performed some of the key studies on how the nursing workforce influences health outcomes, including seminal articles published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2002 and 2011.

This piece discusses how increased supervision influences the educational experience for trainees.

Pat Croskerry, MD, PhD, is a professor in emergency medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Trained as an experimental psychologist, Dr. Croskerry went on to become an emergency medicine physician, and found himself surprised by the relatively scant amount of attention given to cognitive errors. He has gone on to become one of the world's foremost experts in safety in emergency medicine and in diagnostic errors. We spoke to him about both.

Thomas J. Nasca, MD, is the executive director and chief executive officer of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). Prior to joining the ACGME in 2007, Dr. Nasca, a nephrologist, was dean of Jefferson Medical College and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs of Thomas Jefferson University. We asked him to speak with us about the role of the ACGME in patient safety.

Clear health communication is increasingly recognized as essential for promoting patient safety. Yet according to a recent Joint Commission report, What Did the Doctor Say?

In October 2004, in what immediately became a landmark paper in patient safety, Dr. Landrigan and his colleagues reported the results of their study on sleep deprivation and medical errors among interns. The AHRQ-funded study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, revealed 36% more serious errors and 5.6 times more serious diagnostic errors among interns working a traditional schedule of more than 24 hours in a row than among interns working shorter shifts (1). We spoke with Dr.