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Communication errors in health care are a persistent challenge to patient safety. This commentary advocates for studying behavioral, cognitive, linguistic, environmental, and technological factors to help understand barriers to effective information exchange in health care. The authors suggest that approaches targeting each set of barriers be developed and embedded into learning activities to generate lasting improvements.

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.

Establishing a culture of safety is an essential component of improving safety within an organization. Analysis of programs that have successfully stimulated innovation to tackle safety issues, such as the Keystone ICU project or Kaiser Permanente, have found that a critical aspect of their success has been understanding the dynamics of how groups of professionals work together. This review explores how social network analysis—a method of examining relationships in complex systems, and how these relationships influence dissemination of knowledge and innovation—has been utilized to develop health professional networks for improving quality and safety. With the growing recognition of the role of context in determining the success of patient safety efforts, social network analysis provides an important tool for developing organizational approaches to improving safety.

This article summarizes the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education's proposed new regulations on housestaff duty hours. The recommendations are perhaps most notable for what they do not contain—a reduction in the 80-hour weekly limit. Rather than narrowly focusing on duty-hour restrictions, the recommendations take a broad approach to maximizing patient safety in training environments through targeted reductions in work hours for first-year residents, enhanced supervision by attending physicians, standardizing expectations around handoffs and signouts, and engaging residents in safety and quality improvement efforts. Although the current 80-hour work week will be preserved, the new regulations would eliminate extended-duration shifts for first-year residents (as was recommended in a 2008 Institute of Medicine report). The current regulations, implemented in 2003, have improved residents' quality of life but have not positively impacted patient safety or educational outcomes. The ACGME acknowledged this evidence in crafting recommendations that seek to establish a culture of safety within residency programs and focus more broadly on enhancing supervision for early-stage residents while allowing more autonomy for senior trainees.

Safety culture surveys focus on respondents' perception of safety in specific contexts, and measurement of safety culture is recommended in order to identify problem areas and targets for improvement. However, this Dutch study, conducted in 33 emergency departments, found that positive safety culture perception may actually inhibit implementation of recommended safety practices. For example, hospitals where respondents felt that handoffs and signouts were carried out safely were less likely to have standardized protocols for supervision or case review. This finding raises the concern that, in some cases, important safety mechanisms may not be implemented due to a false sense of security regarding patient safety.

Pediatric residents felt comfortable caring independently for patients, but reported difficulty working within a team environment, in this study that used the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire to assess safety culture.

The author analyzes one Swedish medication error incident that resulted in criminal charges against the nurse involved and discusses how the media contorted the assignment of blame for the failure.