All Content

Missed nursing care appears to be associated with higher rates of adverse events. More than 3,600 registered nurses (RNs) were surveyed about missed care during labor and birth in the United States. Three aspects of nursing care were reported missing by respondents: thorough review of prenatal records, missed timely documentation of maternal-fetal assessments, and failure to monitor input and output.

Using the events at the United Kingdom’s Mid Staffordshire Trust hospital as a case study, the authors discuss the impact of ‘collective denial’ on organizational processes and safety culture. The authors suggest that safeguards allowing for self-reflection and correction be implemented early in the safety reporting process, and that employees be granted power to speak up about safety concerns.

Pediatric critical care patients are at greater risk for harm. This review examines how a culture of safety affects pediatric critical care delivery and highlights collaboratives as effective mechanisms to develop and test improvement strategies. The authors discuss the development of bundles to reduce hospital-acquired infections and standardize handoffs as promising safety improvement practices.

Clinical staff often fail to call rapid response teams to evaluate deteriorating patients, even when objective criteria for calling the team are met. This qualitative study of physicians and nurses at an Australian hospital found that an impaired culture of safety can result in failure to use the rapid response team when appropriate and can also lead to using the team as a workaround to compensate for poor interdisciplinary communication.

The Leapfrog Group has been a major driver of patient safety efforts—more than 1000 hospitals have committed to implementing its recommendations for computerized provider order entry, intensivist coverage for critically ill patients, evidence-based referral for certain diagnoses, and implementation of the National Quality Forum's (NQF) Safe Practices. A prior study found that hospitals that had implemented at least one Leapfrog practice tended to provide higher quality of care for specific diagnoses. However, in this study, adoption of the NQF safe practices did not correlate with reduced inpatient mortality. The authors note that many hospitals could score highly on the Leapfrog Hospital Survey but not fully implement or consistently follow safety recommendations, as the survey only measures a hospital's self-reported implementation of safety practices.