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Health literacy efforts address challenges related to both language and effective communication tactics. This story discussed how lack of language and information clarity reduced patient education effectiveness during the pandemic and highlights several efforts to address them including information product translation services.

Delays and mistakes in health care for distinct patient populations hold improvement lessons for the broader system. This news story highlights problems in correctional system cancer diagnoses and treatment that may indicate other types of prison care delivery problems.

This story discusses failures related emergency psychiatric assessment, including premature discharge, implicit bias, patient management discontinuity and inappropriate physical restraint that contributed to the death of a patient at risk for suicide.

Implicit biases are known to impact effective diagnosis. This story highlights how dismissed concerns resulted in a delay in cancer diagnosis that contributed to the death of a young woman. 

Delays in elective surgery and other procedures have the potential to lessen safe patient care. This news story describes the decision-making dilemma for physicians to limit patient access to care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their concern is that the delays have the potential to result in diagnostic and treatment service deviations that could result in harm.

Delays in emergency room (ER) triage and assessment contribute to wide range of failures that degrade patient safety. This news story highlights the findings of a government report highlighting overcrowding and production pressures as factors resulting in the death of a patient waiting for care who initially presented at the ER with symptoms of heart attack.

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.

Patients who experience harm while receiving medical care can serve as powerful advocates for patient safety. This news article reports on a patient who became engaged in working to redesign processes to improve patient safety after he became paralyzed from the chest down due to a cascade of communication errors.

Transitions in care between inpatient and outpatient settings are an increasing concern for patient safety. Reporting on a fatal medication error that was missed by a patient's pharmacist and home health nurses, this newspaper article discusses various risks associated with hospital-to-home transitions such as insufficient case management and communication.

Reporting on a case involving an overlooked test result that contributed to the death of a patient in the military medical system, this newspaper article highlights how insufficient transparency can prevent patients and their families from learning about what happened during their care and hinder opportunities to recognize processes in need of improvement.

This newspaper article describes how surgical complications, health care–associated infections, and ineffective patient–provider communication contributed to a patient's experience with harm and suggests that transparency around the incident and preoperative patient briefings could have improved the situation.

This series offers five magazine articles exploring how diagnostic error, delayed treatment, and insufficient attention to patient concerns and medical history within the Veterans Affairs health system contributed to preventable harm and death.

Reporting on serious lapses in the care provided by the military health system, this newspaper article highlights how systemic problems, such as inadequate review of incidents, poor communication, and lack of transparency, can contribute to patient harm.

This newspaper article reports on the missteps that contributed to the death of a young woman after she was hospitalized in an incident reminiscent of Libby Zion.

This newspaper article reports on gaps in communication and a missed sepsis diagnosis that led to a patient's death.

An emergency crew from a suburb failed to efficiently transport a marathon runner in cardiac arrest to the nearest emergency room in central Chicago.