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Simulation is a recognized technique to educate and plan to improve care processes and safety. This pair of special issues highlights the use of simulation in nursing and its value in work such as communication enhancement, minority population care, and patient deterioration.   

This website for independent community pharmacy owners across the United Kingdom features both free and members-only guidance, reporting platforms, and document templates to support patient safety. It includes reporting tools and incident analysis reports for providers in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Topics covered in the communications include look-alike and sound-alike drugs, patient safety audits, and safe dispensing of liquid medications.

The Institute of Medicine report, To Err Is Human, marked the founding of the patient safety field. This special issue of Health Affairs, published 20 years after that report, highlights achievements and progress to date. One implementation study of evidence-based surgical safety checklists demonstrated that leadership involvement, intensive activities, and engagement of frontline staff are all critical to successful adoption of safety practices. Another study demonstrated that communication-and-resolution programs either decreased or did not affect malpractice costs, providing further support for implementing such programs. Experts describe the critical role of human factors engineering in patient safety and outline how to enhance the use of these methods. The concluding editorial by David Bates and Hardeep Singh points to progress in reducing hospital-acquired infections and improving medication safety in acute care settings and highlights remaining gaps in the areas of outpatient care, diagnostic errors, and electronic health record safety. In the related information, the Moore Foundation provides free access to five articles in this special issue.

Articles in this special issue provide insights into how human error can affect the safety of oral and maxillofacial surgery, a primarily ambulatory environment. The authors cover topics such as simulation training, wrong-site surgery, and the safety of office-based anesthesia.

This newspaper article reports on gaps in communication and a missed sepsis diagnosis that led to a patient's death.

This book provides an introduction to key patient safety topics and includes a set of 20 case studies to demonstrate opportunities for error prevention.

This special issue discusses Canadian patient safety efforts in identifying risks, designing safe systems, implementing solutions, developing learning systems, and understanding legal decision making.

This monthly selection of error reports includes examples of confusion regarding medication delivery instructions and sound-alike mistakes involving epinephrine and ephedrine.

This monthly selection of medication error reports describes a case of misidentifying home medications for a hospitalized patient, how character space limitations in medication administration records may cause medication errors, and fatal misuse of a fentanyl patch on a child. 

This monthly selection of medication error reports addresses examples of unclear dose preparation instructions, potential insulin storage mix ups, and drug name confusion.

This monthly selection of medication error reports discusses product name confusion, an unsafe process for outdated drug replacement, and smart pump dose administration problems.

This monthly selection of medication error reports includes an error averted because the pharmacist checked the patient's prior prescription data and a dosing error due to consumer confusion about dose measurement.

This special issue includes articles that discuss the safety of home-based medical care.