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Nurses play a critical role in reducing preventable harm among inpatients. This cross-sectional survey of nurses working in general medicine wards identified both enabling factors (behavioral regulation, perceived capabilities, and environmental context/resources) and barriers (intentions, perceived consequences, optimism, and professional role) to implementing comprehensive harm prevention programs for older adult inpatients.

Previous research identified a relationship between anesthesia handoffs and rates of major complications and mortality compared to patients who had the same anesthesiologist throughout their procedure. This retrospective cohort study including over 102,000 patients in Ontario, Canada, explored this relationship among patients undergoing cardiac surgery. Analyses revealed that anesthesia handovers were associated with poorer outcomes (i.e., higher 30-day and one-year mortality rates, longer hospitalizations and intensive care unit stays) compared with patients who had the same anesthesiologist throughout their procedure.

Handoffs occur several times during a perioperative encounter, increasing the risk of communication errors. Structured handoffs, such as situation-background-assessment-recommendation (SBAR) and checklists, have been shown to improve communication between providers during anesthesia care. The authors discuss how these tools and other processes can improve shared understanding of effective handoffs.

Incident reporting systems are used to detect patient safety concerns and determine potential causes and opportunities for improvements. In the perioperative setting of one hospital, insufficient handoffs were the most common event type in the “coordination of care” category. Use of structured handoffs is recommended to improve communication and patient safety.

Intraoperative handoffs between anesthesiologists are frequently necessary but are not without risk. This systematic review of 14 studies of intraoperative handoffs and handoff tools found that use of handoff tools has a positive impact on patient safety. Additional research is needed around design and implementation of tools, particularly the use of electronic health records to record handoffs.  

Standardized handoff protocols from the operating room to the intensive care unit have improved patient safety, but clinician compliance and long-term sustainability remain poor. This study identified four phases of post-operative handoff associated with risk factors: pre-transfer preparation, transfer and set up, report preparation and delivery, and post-transfer care. The authors recommend “flexibly standardized” handoff intervention tools for safe transfer from operating room to intensive care.

Errors in surgical specimen handling can cause treatment delays or missed diagnoses. This children’s hospital implemented a quality improvement effort to reduce surgical specimen errors. Using a variety of methods, including changes to specimen labeling, improved communication, and specimen time-out, they were able to decrease the mean rate of order errors and labeling-related errors.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically increased the use of telehealth across various medical specialties.This systematic review did not identify any differences in patient or surgeon satisfaction or patient-reported outcomes with telehealth for orthopedic care delivery as compared to in-person visits.However, the authors note that the included studies did not adequately capture or report safety endpoints, such as complications or missed diagnoses.

Engaging patients and families is an important strategy in ensuring safe health care delivery. In this prospective, observational study, use of a parent-centered script did not improve parent engagement during the preinduction checklist and resulted in an expected decline in checklist adherence.  

Prior research has found that intraoperative anesthesia handovers can increase patient morbidity and mortality. However, this retrospective cohort study, focused on pediatric surgical patients treated, found that intraoperative anesthesia handovers were not associated with adverse postoperative outcomes.  

Handoffs between providers can introduce patient safety risks. This systematic review explored the impacts of intraoperative anesthesia handovers (e.g., intraoperative relief, transferring care to an incoming provider) on patient safety outcomes. The researchers pooled four studies and found that an intraoperative anesthesia handover significantly increases the risk of an adverse event by 40%.

Children undergoing intrahospital transport are at risk for adverse events. This study used perioperative adverse event data reported to a patient safety organization to identify pediatric anesthesia transport-associated adverse events. A small proportion (5%) of pediatric anesthesia adverse events were associated with transport, but the majority of events were deemed preventable and one-third resulted in patient harm. Cardiac arrest and respiratory events occurred most frequently and largely affected very young children (<6 month). A previous WebM&M discussed a perioperative respiratory event in a pediatric patient during intrahospital transport.

Retained surgical items (RSI) are considered ‘never events’ but continue to occur. In this study, researchers compared the RSI rate in Veterans Health (VA) surgery programs with (n=46) and without (n=91) surgical count technology and analyzed the resulting root cause analyses (RCA) for these events. The RSI rate was significantly higher in for the programs with surgical count technology compared to the programs without (1/18,221 vs. 1/30,593). Analysis of RCAs found the majority of incidents (64%) involved human factors issues (e.g., staffing changes during shifts, staff fatigue), policy/procedure failures (e.g., failure to perform methodical wound sweep) or communication errors.

In this retrospective review of root cause analysis (RCA) reports of select gastrointestinal procedures, researchers identified 27 adverse events 30-month period. Nearly half (48%) of events caused major or catastrophic harm. The most frequently reported adverse events were attributable to human factors (22%), medication errors (22%) or retained items; retained items were associated with the most harm.

This study examined whether increased team turnover raises the likelihood of sharp count errors by surgical teams and negatively affects patient outcomes. Analyses of all cardiac operations performed at Massachusetts General Hospital over a 5-year period revealed that sharp count errors were associated with higher rates of in-hospital mortality and were more prevalent with increased team turnover and on weekends. A prior Web M&M commentary discusses adverse outcomes arising due a retained foreign object during cardiac surgery.

Utilizing American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Project  (ACS NSQIP) data, the authors looked at the effects of intraoperative handoffs  involving anesthesia personnel in two hospitals. Initial findings of higher rates of adverse outcomes were no longer statistically significant when confounding variables were added to the analysis.