All Content

The COVID-19 pandemic is a rapidly evolving situation that requires a system orientation to diagnosis, management and post-acute care to keep clinicians, patients, families and communities safe. This set of recommendations is anchored on a human factors approach to provide overarching direction to design systems and approaches to respond to the virus. The recommendations focus on team communication and organizational culture; the diagnostic process; patient and family engagement to reduce spread; hospital, pediatric, and maternity processes and treatments; triage decision ethics; discharge communications; home isolation; psychological safety of staff and patients, and; outcome measures. An appendix covers drug interactions and adverse effects for medications used to treat this patient population. The freely-available full text document will be updated appropriately as Italy continues to respond, learn and amend its approach during the outbreak.

This announcement highlights container confusion as a contributing factor for accidental spinal injection of tranexamic acid. Storage, purchase, and preparation recommendations are shared to minimize errors with this medication.

Health systems are rapidly adjusting processes to successfully respond to COVID-19 crisis demands. This webinar featured tactics used and discussed initiative results to inform continued improvement. The speaker roster included Jeff Brady, MD and Rollin (Terry) Fairbanks, MD.  

Air transport service combines risks associated with both aviation and prehospital trauma care. This article discusses the role of human factors in this fast-paced care environment. The author encourages efforts to reduce risks through policy change, purchasing the latest safety equipment, and empowering staff to decline calls when conditions are unsafe.

Errors in the administration of intravenous medications can result in patient harm. This set of articles discusses the results of a nationwide IV push medication survey. The first article reviews unsafe practices in care delivery as defined by inpatient clinicians. The second article recommends ways to improve practice such as assessment of current practices, use of prefilled syringes, and heightened attention to effective labeling.

Increased urgency to prevent maternal mortality has uncovered various factors that diminish safety. This newsletter article reports on incidents involving the accidental misuse of epidural analgesia and intravenous antibiotics in labor and delivery care, describes contributing factors (e.g., health technology missteps, barcoding mistakes, and look-alike medications), and offers improvement strategies to mitigate harm.

This audio segment discusses two incidents involving pediatric patient harm associated with central line use and highlights successful reduction of central line infections after investigation, standardization, and checklist use in many hospitals.