Nurse staffing and patient care outcomes are linked, yet variation exists in nursing coverage throughout the United States. This submitted bill aims to legislate a national minimum nurse-to-patient staffing ratio as a strategy to enhance safety and quality improvement.

Patients face risks when undergoing surgery. This revised guidance provides recommendations developed by multidisciplinary consensus and outlines how organizations can implement the standards to improve safety of invasive procedures. The report is centered on areas of effort targeting both organizational and process-level actions. 

Racial and ethnic inequalities are emerging as a primary contributor to harmful maternal care. This guidance examines obstacles to safe care for mothers of color and shares recommendations to reduce disparities such as team-based care and implicit bias training.

Medication errors associated with surgery and other invasive procedures can result in patient harm. This 10-element guidance suggests effective practices to address identified weaknesses in perioperative and procedural medication processes. Recommendations provided cover topics such as drug labeling, communication, and risk management.

Organ transplantation processes require reliable communication and technical expertise to ensure safety for organ delivery and patient care. This hearing discussed the findings of a United States Senate investigation into waste and harm in the US organ transplant system. Blood-type mistakes, transport failures, and process challenges were amongst the problems discussed.

Variation across standards and processes can result in misunderstandings that disrupt care safety. This guidance applied expert consensus to examine existing anesthesia monitoring standards worldwide. Recommendations are provided for organizations and providers to guide anesthesia practice in a variety of environments to address patient safety issues including accidental patient awareness during surgery.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a rapidly evolving situation that requires a system orientation to diagnosis, management and post-acute care to keep clinicians, patients, families and communities safe. This set of recommendations is anchored on a human factors approach to provide overarching direction to design systems and approaches to respond to the virus. The recommendations focus on team communication and organizational culture; the diagnostic process; patient and family engagement to reduce spread; hospital, pediatric, and maternity processes and treatments; triage decision ethics; discharge communications; home isolation; psychological safety of staff and patients, and; outcome measures. An appendix covers drug interactions and adverse effects for medications used to treat this patient population. The freely-available full text document will be updated appropriately as Italy continues to respond, learn and amend its approach during the outbreak.