Human factors influence how humans and systems interact to make processes more reliable or more error-prone during both normal and unexpected circumstances. This guideline provides recommendations centered on elements of communication, the organization, the work environment, and training to guide the consideration of human factors in improvement actions during critical anesthesia or intensive care situations.

Pharmacists working with surgical teams bring distinct safety context, expertise, and process awareness to perioperative care. These guidelines outline how pharmacists can help reduce medication errors before, during, and after surgery. Perioperative pharmacists can enhance communication, medication histories, and process reliability.

Surgical site infections are a persistent and costly challenge to patient safety. These guidelines provide recommendations to reduce this common hospital-acquired condition, including policies for surgeon attire, hand hygiene, and equipment sterilization.

Sentinel event alerts are issued periodically by The Joint Commission to identify common or emerging patient safety problems and provide organizations with approaches for addressing these issues. A retained foreign object (RFO)—surgical materials or equipment unintentionally left in a patient's body after completing the operation—is a never event that can have serious clinical consequences. Despite being long recognized as a critical—and preventable—error, RFOs continue to occur, with nearly 800 cases being reported to The Joint Commission between 2005 and 2012. This alert makes several recommendations to help prevent RFOs, including focusing on enhancing the reliability of the traditional manual count of instruments and materials used during a procedure, improving safety culture in the operating room through interventions (e.g., teamwork training), and investigating technological approaches (e.g., bar coding of surgical sponges) to ease identification of potentially missing objects before patients are harmed.

This scientific statement from the American Heart Association (AHA) reviews the current state of knowledge on safety issues in the operating room (OR) and provides detailed recommendations for hospitals to implement to improve safety and patient outcomes. These recommendations include using checklists and formal handoff protocols for every procedure, teamwork training and other approaches to enhance safety culture, applying human factors engineering principles to optimize OR design and minimize fatigue, and taking steps to discourage disruptive behavior by clinicians. AHA scientific statements, which are considered the standard of care for cardiac patients, have traditionally focused on clinical issues, but this article (and an earlier statement on medication error prevention) illustrates the critical importance of ensuring safety in this complex group of patients.

This guideline describes recommendations for preoperative assessment of elderly surgical patients, including risk factors for postoperative delirium and pulmonary complications, to enhance safety and reduce readmissions.