The AHRQ PSNet Collection comprises an extensive selection of resources relevant to the patient safety community. These resources come in a variety of formats, including literature, research, tools, and Web sites. Resources are identified using the National Library of Medicine’s Medline database, various news and content aggregators, and the expertise of the AHRQ PSNet editorial and technical teams.
Miscommunication during care transitions can contribute to medical errors. This article discusses how handoff communication tools can help to improve reliability of information transfer associated with anesthesia practice. The authors emphasize the importance of standardizing the process of perioperative data collection.
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.
In this article, a nurse shares her firsthand account of what it was like to be a surgical patient and the surprising safety and quality shortcomings she encountered during her hospital stay.
This article draws from the reporting system in Pennsylvania to discuss lost surgical pathology specimens and recommend a systems-oriented approach to improvement.