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Improving patient safety is a global goal. This literature review explored patient safety interventions focused on people living in fragile, conflict-affected, and vulnerable settings. Studies were generally from lower and lower-middle income countries and focused primarily on strengthening infection prevention and control; however, there is a call for more attention on providing patient safety training to healthcare workers, introducing risk management tools, and reducing preventable harm during care delivery.

Transfusion errors can have serious consequences. This retrospective analysis used a Canadian national database to characterize patient registration-related errors in the blood transfusion process. Findings indicate that registration errors most commonly occur in outpatient areas and emergency departments and can lead to delays in transfusion.

Incident reporting systems may be underutilized by medical trainees. This article describes a brief, interactive simulation activity to improve identification and reporting of patient safety hazards among medical students and interns.

This article describes the implementation of a hospital-wide patient safety strategy aimed at reducing hospital-wide adverse events at a single large hospital in Singapore. The strategy included establishing interdisciplinary patient safety teams to identify areas of preventable harm, determine root causes, improve departmental accountability, and leveraging simulation training. Over a 7-year period, adverse event rates decreased significantly (as did the incidence of preventable adverse events and the incidence of events resulting in permanent harm, the use of life-sustaining interventions, or death.

Using a Safety-II framework, the authors used a mixed-methods approach to retrospectively analyze root cause analysis (RCA) reports of ‘never events’ occurring in the United Kingdom to characterize proposed actions, insights and recommendations to prevent future events. The analysis found that proposed actions were generally of low-to-moderate effectiveness, and that despite identifying systems challenges and weaknesses, many reports did not include proposed actions to mitigate or remove risks. The authors conclude that applying concepts from resilient healthcare can identify vulnerabilities and opportunities for strengthening the RCA system and improving the quality of RCA reports.

This article describes how a children's hospital used root cause analysis to drive improvements in patient safety.

This monthly column highlights an initiative to introduce safer device connectors to prevent spinal and epidural medications from being delivered intravenously, discusses the value of independent double-checks, and shares thoughts on the 35th anniversary of this column.

This monthly article discusses incidents involving dosing errors and describes strategies to promote the safe use of oral syringes.

This study describes the integration of simulation exercises into nursing education as a method to improve practice behaviors, including hand hygiene and patient identification.

Laboratory technicians reported very low usage of incident reporting systems, primarily due to lack of time available to complete reports.