Reducing maternal morbidity and mortality is a critical patient safety priority. Developed by the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health (AIM), this patient safety bundle provides guidance for healthcare teams to improve the prevention, recognition, and treatment of infections and sepsis among pregnant and postpartum patients.

Anesthesia provision is a high-risk practice. This guidance provides practical steps to ensure perioperative medication delivery is as safe as possible. This material recommends approaches for both clinicians and organizations to enable collaborative safety efforts in anesthesia, including prefilled syringes, standardization, and adherence to safe labeling practices.

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.

Emergency room crowding is a persistent factor that degrades safety for patients of all ages. This collection provides background, best practices, and recommendations to reduce emergency department crowding and its negative impact on pediatric care. The publications examine factors that influence crowding and improvement at the input, departmental, and hospital/outpatient stages of emergency care.

The demand for, and acceptance of, telemedicine solutions to provide services has grown substantially in recent years as safety profiles for the services are being defined. This guideline examines its use in pregnancy-related care, discusses the benefits and suggests actions to ensure patient safety during these encounters such as development of appropriate metrics and methods for vital-sign monitoring.

Children with emergent care needs are often cared for in complex situations that can diminish safety. This joint policy statement updates preceding recommendations to enhance the safety of care to children presenting at the emergency department. It expands on the application of topics within a high-reliability framework focusing on leadership, managerial factors, and organizational factors that support safety culture and workforce empowerment to support safe emergency care for children.

The reduction of cognitive bias is generating increased interest as a diagnostic error reduction strategy. This statement introduces the concept of cognitive bias and discusses methods to manage the presence of bias in obstetrics such as debiasing training and teamwork.

Opioid misuse is an urgent patient safety issue, including postsurgical opioid misuse among pediatric patients. Based on the systematic review, a multidisciplinary group of health care and opioid stewardship experts proposes evidence-based opioid prescribing guidelines for children who need surgery. Endorsed guideline statements highlight three primary themes for perioperative pain management in children: (1) health care professionals must recognize the risks of pediatric opioid misuse, (2) use non-opioid pain relief, and (3) pre- and post-operative education for patients and families regarding pain management and safe opioid use.

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.

Obstetrics is a high-risk practice that concurrently manages the safety of mothers and newborns. This commentary describes the importance of standardization, checklist use, auditing and feedback, peer coaching, and interdisciplinary communication as strategies to reduce risks. The discussion spotlights the need for national guidelines and definitions to reduce variation in auditing and training activities and calls for heightened engagement of health care professionals to improve the safety and quality of obstetric care in Canada. An Annual Perspective reviewed work on improving maternal safety.

This expert guidance provides recommendations to help health care facilities develop policies for preventing health care–associated infections in the operating room. The authors build on existing anesthesia safety practices to outline specific actions for infection prevention and control.

This revised set of guidelines suggests standards to ensure high-quality care for pediatric patients in the emergency department, including a section on improving patient safety. Key recommendations focus on pediatric emergency care coordinators and implementing quality control mechanisms.

Safe anesthesia is a global concern. These standards provide guidance and recommendations for clinicians, administrators, and governments as they review, implement, and manage anesthesia services in a variety of care environments. The standards center on themes related to professional qualification; facilities and equipment; medications and intravenous fluids; monitoring; and anesthesia delivery.

Incidents involving maternal harm require analysis to provide learning and assist design of prevention strategies. This consensus document outlines an organizational process to determine cases for review and provides a set of diagnostic and complication screening criteria to assess severe maternal morbidity incidents for quality review. The document supersedes the Sentinel Event Alert on maternal harm.