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Nursing home residents, staff, and care processes were particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. This collection of resources examines data and documentation involving one nursing home chain to reveal systemic problems that contributed to failure. It shares family stories that illustrate how COVID affected care in long-term care environments.

Human factors concepts are central to improvement in high-risk industries and efforts are emerging to enfold them into health care organizations to improve safety. This special issue explores themes that underscore successful application of human factors practices into healthcare: culture change toward high reliability, team improvement, technology integration, and measures development.

Incomplete nursing care is known to affect care quality and safety. This special issue documents the global problem of missed or rationed nursing care in a variety of settings and countries. Articles featured in this special issue examine systemic issues, explore interventions, and evaluate measurement tools.

COVID-19 is a novel coronavirus that harbors a variety of diagnostic, treatment, and management hurdles. This special issue covers a variety of clinical topics including optimal diagnostic methods, near misses, and diagnostic accuracy.   

The COVID-19 crisis has disproportionally impacted the lives of older adults, their caregivers, and the communities in which they live. This special issue includes articles examining topics such as the role of policies affecting this patient population, effective communication with older adults and concerns associated with long-term care facilities.    

Research and error reporting are important strategies to uncover problems in health system performance. This special issue highlights vendor transparency and context as important areas of focus to ensure electronic health records (EHR) research and reporting help improve system reliability. The articles cover topics such as a framework for research reporting, design of randomized controlled trials for technology studies, and designing research on patient portal enhancement.

Assisted living facilities have challenges that reduce the quality and safety of care. This news investigation examines how poor management, staffing shortages, and poor caregiver training were unchecked by systemic failures in correcting problems to protect residents. 

Nursing home patients are vulnerable to preventable harm due to poor safety culture, insufficient staffing levels, lack of regulation enforcement, and misaligned financial incentives. This news investigation reports on how poor practices resulted in resident harm in Pennsylvania nursing homes and discusses strategies for improvement, such as enhancing investigation processes.

Older patients are likely to be prescribed multiple medications, which can increase risks. Articles in this special issue explore polypharmacy in a variety of care settings and provide tactics for improvement, such as enhancing care integration for older patients through medication reconciliation and deprescribing initiatives.

Safety challenges in residential care facilities are well documented. Articles in this special issue explore falls in rehabilitation settings, including nurses' role in managing fall risks and strategies to prevent falls.

This series, developed in conjunction with the STAAR initiative, provides tactics and resources to improve transitions across various care settings.

This supplement discusses Australian efforts to improve handover safety with emphasis on flexible standardization, communication improvement, and information sharing tactics.