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Maternal harm during and after pregnancy is a sentinel event. This campaign encourages women, families, and health providers to identify and speak up with concerns about maternal care and act on them. The program seeks to inform the design of support systems and tool development that enhance maternal safety.

In this annual publication, AHRQ reviews the results of the National Healthcare Quality Report and National Healthcare Disparities Report. This 2021 report highlights that a wide range of quality measures have shown improvement in quality, access, and cost.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) provides consumers with publicly available information on the quality of Medicare-certified hospital care through this Web site. The site includes specific information for both patients and hospitals on how to use the data to guide decision-making and improvement initiatives. Most recently, listings from the Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program (HACRP) and data on Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals were added to the reports available.

Uncertainty, misinformation, management gaps, and rapid escalation undermine crisis response effectiveness. This article illustrates system, leadership, and process failures that contributed to harms associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This annual report compiles patient safety data documented by Massachusetts hospitals. The 2019 numbers represent a modest increase in serious reportable events recorded in acute care hospitals, from 1066 the previous year to 1189. This presentation also includes events from ambulatory surgery centers. Previous years reports are also available.

Implicit and explicit biases affect many facets of the health care delivery system. This story shares African-American patient experiences with bias that reduced the safety of maternity care. 

This organization shares best practices to align and optimize efforts toward eliminating patient harm by the year 2030. The Foundation supports several awareness initiatives to drive improvements associated with its strategic aims that include promoting transparency, realigning safer care incentives, and informing patients and families about patient safety.

Maternal morbidity and perinatal harm can be exacerbated due to implicit bias. This story discusses a case of an American Indian/Alaska Native mother and infants whose deaths may have been preventable had her concerns been more effectively addressed. The situation illustrates conditions in the broader indigenous peoples’ community that indicate a lack of respect and patient-centeredness as factors contributing to poor care.

The Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority is a long-established source of patient safety data analysis and application-focused commentary. Their publishing output aims to generate improvements in their state as well as throughout health care. This open-access publication replaces the quarterly Pennsylvania Patient Safety Advisory newsletter.

Financial incentives may encourage adoption of practice improvements that enhance safety. This news article reports on the increase in United States hospitals that have had Medicare payments withheld due to high rates of hospital-acquired conditions. The article is accompanied by a state-level tally of individual hospitals penalized.

Error disclosures are difficult but important conversations that can have negative consequences for patients, clinicians, and organizations, even when they are done appropriately. This newspaper article offers insights from a doctor who experienced both sides of disclosure, as a physician disclosing an error and as a patient whose physician missed a complication, and discusses how to manage relationships once clinical mistakes are recognized.

Sepsis is a serious condition that can be fatal if it is not promptly diagnosed and treated. This news article reports on systemic factors in nursing homes such as poor staffing and communication with families that contribute to unmanaged pressure ulcers and sepsis that result in hospital admissions and death. A WebM&M commentary discussed a case involving a patient who had a pressure ulcer and sepsis in long-term care.

The Partnership for Patients program has supported the Hospital Engagement Networks since 2011. This report reviews the results of the second round of funded effort, which involved more than 1500 hospitals in the United States that prevented 34,000 harms from September 2015 to September 2016. Areas of improvement included reductions in surgical site infections, adverse drug events, and postoperative complications. The authors also highlight core strategies of the program, such as evidence dissemination and coaching.

Antimicrobial resistance is a pervasive threat to patient safety. This news article discusses incidents involving methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection to spotlight the need for health care to develop system-level approaches to measuring the problem and enforce regulations designed to prevent health care–associated infections. A PSNet perspective described one nurse's experience with MRSA as a patient.

Delayed diagnosis of sepsis can have serious consequences. This article and accompanying set of infographics spotlight the importance of prompt identification and treatment of sepsis and suggest how providers, organizations, patients, and families can help improve recognition of sepsis.

This news article reports on health care–associated infections, particularly Clostridium difficile and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, discusses ways hospitals and patients can help prevent them, and emphasizes the need to advocate for reduced antibiotic use and improved cleanliness.