All Content

System failures require multifactorial assessment to install targeted improvements. This toolkit examines 10 areas of focus for organizations to assess the safety of mental health services in emergent and primary care settings to minimize patient suicide and self-harm. Areas of focus include post-discharge follow-up, admissions, and family engagement.

This fact sheet provides a list of high-alert medications commonly used in ambulatory care and recommends strategies to reduce risk of errors.

The National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Reports review analysis specific to tracking patient safety challenges and improvements across ambulatory, home health, hospital, and nursing home environments. The most recent Chartbook documented improvements in approximately half of the patient safety measures tracked. This set of tools includes summaries drawn from the reports for use in presentations to enhance distribution and application of the data.

Diagnostic error prevention in primary care is a persistent challenge. This AHRQ-funded toolkit provides guidance for ambulatory care organizations that seek to improve the reliability of diagnosis in children. The material focuses on tactics to enhance how practices recognize, track, and follow up on adolescent depression, pediatric elevated blood pressure, and actionable laboratory results.

Health care–associated infections are a known contributor to adverse events among patients on dialysis. Building on evidence and insights from clinicians, this four-part toolkit includes videos, assessment tools, and slide presentations regarding how to apply principles of teamwork, patient engagement, and safety culture to ensure dialysis centers provide safe care to patients with end-stage renal disease.

Standardization has been embraced as a strategy to improve health literacy and to reduce patient misunderstanding of medication instructions. This tool provides standard language that clarifies directions for patients regarding when they should take their medications.

This collection of toolkits provides resources to support safety in ambulatory care and includes information about fall prevention and surgical checklists.

This toolkit provides resources to help augment testing processes in ambulatory care settings, including tools for identifying areas of concern and measuring improvements.

This tool evaluates the safety of cancer treatment delivery in hospitals and ambulatory care settings.

This AHRQ-funded publication provides a tool to help organizations identify health literacy issues, as well as methods for implementing an action plan drawn from assessment results.

Culture has been described as a key to establishing high reliability organizations. The National Quality Forum's Safe Practices for Healthcare and the Leapfrog Group both mandate hospitals to regularly assess their safety culture. This AHRQ Web site provides validated safety culture survey tools (Hospital, Medical Office, Nursing Home, Community Pharmacy, Ambulatory Surgery Center) and user guides health care organizations can use to implement the surveys. Organizations can also use the AHRQ database to compare their Surveys on Patient Safety Culture™ (SOPS®) results. In addition, reports are available that summarize the benchmarking data across cohorts nationwide. An AHRQ WebM&M perspective discussed how to establish a safety culture.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Quality Indicators (QIs) represent quality measures that make use of a hospital's available administrative data to inform improvement. This Web site provides access to four modules of indicators: prevention, inpatient, pediatric, and patient safety.