Patients can identify errors in their medical records that health care providers may not recognize. This news article highlights the importance of patients correcting seemingly simple mistakes such as name misspellings and phone numbers as these errors can contribute to situations that result in patient harm.

Misidentification of patients can result in problems such as medication administration delays, blood transfusion mismatches, and wrong-patient surgery. This magazine article reviews recent research on this issue and suggests several system approaches for improvement, including the use of patient photos in electronic health records and standardizing patient identification processes.

This report provides background on the Minnesota Never Events reporting initiative, tips for patients on how to receive the safest care possible, and a table of events reported by all hospitals in the state.

This news piece reports on wrong-site and wrong-patient surgery and describes efforts to prevent surgical errors following a Joint Commission sentinel event alert on the topic.

This news story describes an incident of patient misidentification and offers tips to help patients confirm their care during a hospitalization.

This article examines 2007 state health data on never events in the context of a label-related medical error that resulted in a recent death.

This article investigates the causes of surgical errors reported in recent years by Massachusetts hospitals, and identifies team training and instrument bar-coding as solutions for improvement.

In this article, a nurse shares her firsthand account of what it was like to be a surgical patient and the surprising safety and quality shortcomings she encountered during her hospital stay.

Created in 2001 to institute changes in health care across the United Kingdom, the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) presents their first report of patient safety incidents. The two-part report begins with a general discussion of incident reporting, the basis for a national reporting system, and the development of the Patient Safety Observatory. The second part builds on this framework by discussing how the acquired data can be used and translated into safer health care strategies. The report itself encompasses more than 85,000 collected incident reports with analysis, comparisons, and case studies to illustrate important safety issues for future efforts. This represents the first of a series of expected reports from NPSA on patient safety data to be published.