Patient fall rates can be impacted by numerous factors, such as staffing, safety culture, and individual nurse safety attitudes. In this study of 619 hospital nurses, a strong safety climate, good working conditions, and lower rates of self-reported missed care were associated with a lower incidence of inpatient falls. Additionally, good collaboration between nurses, physicians, and pharmacists was associated with lower fall rates.

Patient handoffs present opportunities for miscommunication and errors. This quasi-experimental study examined the impact of an electronic nursing handover system (ENHS) on patient safety and handover quality among patients both with and without COVID-19 in the intensive care unit (ICU). Findings indicate that the ENHS improved the quality of the handover, reduced handover time, and increased patient safety.

Missed or incomplete nursing care can adversely affect care quality and safety. Based on survey responses from 295 frontline nurses in the Philippines, this study explored factors contributing to missed nursing care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings suggest that nurses most frequently missed tasks such as patient surveillance, comforting patients, skin care, ambulation, and oral hygiene. The authors suggest that increasing nurse staffing, adequate use of personal protective equipment, and improved safety culture may reduce instances of missed care.  

Missed and delayed diagnosis are a known cause of preventable adverse events. In this cohort of 107 patients with severe or critical COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, 45% developed acute kidney injury (AKI). However, nearly half of those patients (46%) were not diagnosed during their stay in the hospital. Patients with undiagnosed AKI experienced greater hospital mortality than those without AKI or diagnosed AKI. Involvement of intensive care kidney specialists is recommended to increase diagnostic awareness.

This qualitative study conducted focus groups with 28 registered nurses working in different hospital settings to explore perspectives regarding decision-making and personal or contextual attributes leading to missed nursing care.  Three themes emerged based on the analysis: missed nursing care can result due to scarce resources or nurses’ agency, differences in thinking based on routine or novel situations, and situational factors triggering fluctuations in their awareness (such as difficult patients or the presence of family). The authors suggest that organizational training programs should encourage nurses to identify barriers and facilitators of missed nursing care and approaches to overcome these factors.

Patients admitted to the hospital on the weekend have been shown to experience worse outcomes compared to those admitted on weekdays. This weekend effect has been observed numerous times across multiple health care settings. However, whether patient characteristics (patients admitted on the weekend may be more severely ill) or system factors (less staffing and certain services may not be available on the weekend) are primarily responsible remains debated. In this systematic review and meta-analysis including 68 studies, researchers found a pooled odds ratio for weekend mortality of 1.16. Moreover, the weekend effect in these studies was more pronounced for elective rather than unplanned admissions. They conclude that the evidence suggesting that the weekend effect reflects worse quality of care is of low quality. A past PSNet perspective discussed the significance of the weekend effect with regard to cardiology.

Correct identification of patient specimens is crucial to timely and accurate diagnosis. This pre–post study demonstrated substantial improvements in already low rates of patient specimen identification errors following each of three successive strategies: discarding improperly labeled specimens, using barcodes, and automating specimen labeling.

Full-time trauma surgeons had a lower incidence of diagnostic errors (defined as the incidence of missed injuries in severely injured patients) compared with surgeons who primarily practiced in other specialties, according to this retrospective analysis of patients admitted to a Taiwanese surgical intensive care unit.

This study discovered that use of mobile patient safety information systems can contribute to improvement in services and a reduction in patient risk, but these communication systems may also contribute to physician anxiety.

Unplanned readmissions within 30 days of discharge were associated with problems in the quality of care, including inadequate diagnostic workup and diagnostic error.

Simulation training is being widely implemented in health care, in settings ranging from the emergency department to the operating room. Acting in response to an incident of preventable hypoglycemia, this Israeli hospital conducted a simulation training exercise focusing on teamwork training for nurses, with the goal of improving patient handoffs. The intervention resulted in improvement in nurses' communication of critical information during handoffs.

The authors studied anesthesia-related incident reports at one institution and found that many incidents were related to communication, behavior, and delays in service.

The investigators reviewed evidence on ultrasonographic guidance for breast biopsy and provide suggestions on how to minimize sampling error and other problems associated with this diagnostic procedure.