All Content

Anesthesia services are high risk despite progress made in the specialty to improve its safety. This special section covers issues that affect anesthesia safety such as critical incident debriefing, human factors, and educational strategies.

Surgical patients are at high risk for harm, should errors occur. This special issue covers areas of concern in perioperative anesthesia care that include patient allergies, age, sex and gender considerations, and incident reporting system effectiveness.

Otolaryngology-head and neck surgery is vulnerable to wrong site errors and other challenges present in surgical care. This series of articles highlights key areas of importance for the specialty as they work to enhance patient safety. The 2022 installment covers the role of simulation.

The field of anesthesiology has realized impressive improvements in safety, yet challenges still exist in its practice. This special issue provides discussions on a variety of concerns that require continued effort, including use of early warning scores, differences associated with sex and gender, and use of incident reporting systems.

This monthly commentary explores a wide range of subjects associated with patient safety, such as infection prevention, surgical quality improvement, and high reliability organizations.

Surgical safety is a recognized area of emphasis in patient safety improvement. Articles in this special issue cover topics such as human factors, checklists, teamwork, and telemedicine as a safe support mechanism. 

The complexity of care delivery requires complementary approaches to prevent mistakes. This special section shares clinical and organizational tactics to address anesthesiology safety issues. They include automation failures, the role of the obstetric anesthesiologist in maternal safety, and monitoring effectiveness. 

Anesthesiology critical events are uncommon, and yet they have great potential for harm. This special issue focuses on management of, and preparation for, perioperative critical events and rescue should they occur. The authors highlight simulation training, debriefing, and cognitive aids as methods for improving safety in the operating room.

Simulation is a recognized technique to educate and plan to improve care processes and safety. This pair of special issues highlights the use of simulation in nursing and its value in work such as communication enhancement, minority population care, and patient deterioration.   

The neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is a complex environment that serves a vulnerable population at increased risk for harm should errors occur. This special issue draws from a multidisciplinary set of authors to explore patient safety issues arising in the NICU. Included in the issue are articles examining topic such as video assessment, diagnostic error, and human factors engineering in the NICU.

Surgical patients are at increased risk for harm due to healthcare associated infection. This special issue explores the anesthesiologist's role in infection prevention and the importance of emphasizing hand hygiene and disinfection efforts in the perioperative environment. 

This publication presents patient safety concepts for anesthesia practice, including decision aids to educate and empower patients about anesthesia choice, environmental hazards, interpersonal communication, team training, and use of technology and simulation as educational tools.

Patient safety has been described as an unmet need in physician training. This special issue covers areas of focus for a patient safety curriculum drawn from experience in the German medical education system. Topics covered include human error, blame, and responsibility. Articles also review the epidemiology of common problems such as medication safety, organizational contributors to failure, and diagnostic error.

This news investigation chronicles a series of incidents in a transplant program that resulted in patient harm. The systemic nature of the problems such as insufficient whistleblower protection, accountability, and follow-up on patient concerns culminated in a change of hospital leadership. A previous PSNet interview with Charles Ornstein discussed the role of media in raising awareness of patient safety issues.

The Institute of Medicine report, To Err Is Human, marked the founding of the patient safety field. This special issue of Health Affairs, published 20 years after that report, highlights achievements and progress to date. One implementation study of evidence-based surgical safety checklists demonstrated that leadership involvement, intensive activities, and engagement of frontline staff are all critical to successful adoption of safety practices. Another study demonstrated that communication-and-resolution programs either decreased or did not affect malpractice costs, providing further support for implementing such programs. Experts describe the critical role of human factors engineering in patient safety and outline how to enhance the use of these methods. The concluding editorial by David Bates and Hardeep Singh points to progress in reducing hospital-acquired infections and improving medication safety in acute care settings and highlights remaining gaps in the areas of outpatient care, diagnostic errors, and electronic health record safety. In the related information, the Moore Foundation provides free access to five articles in this special issue.

Quality and value have intersecting influence on the safety of health care. Articles in this special issue explore key principles of safe orthopedic care for both adult and pediatric patients. Topics covered include leadership's role in implementing sustainable improvement, postsurgery patient education as a safety tactic, and the impact of surgical volume on safe, high-quality care.

This special issue highlights areas in otolaryngology where simulation is being used to develop multidisciplinary team-based approaches to care and education. Topics covered include the use of simulation for system improvement, the value of debriefing, and the economics of simulation.

Articles in this special issue provide insights into how human error can affect the safety of oral and maxillofacial surgery, a primarily ambulatory environment. The authors cover topics such as simulation training, wrong-site surgery, and the safety of office-based anesthesia.