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Safe patient care is reliant on a healthy healthcare workforce. This alert emphasizes organizational conditions and supporting the wellbeing of clinicians under the stress of providing care during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

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.

Nonprescription drugs are commonly associated with medication errors. This draft guidance seeks to provide a structure for industry to reduce instances of drug name confusion in nonprescription formulas of prescription medications. It describes the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) vetting process for drug names to improve naming actions prior to submission to the agency. The timeline for submitting comments is early February 2021. 

Look-alike and sound-alike names weaken the safety of medication use. This guidance provides a structure for industry to reduce instances of drug name similarities and describes the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) vetting process for drug names to improve naming actions prior to submission to the agency.

The National Patient Safety Goals (NPSGs) are one of the major methods by which The Joint Commission establishes standards for ensuring patient safety in all health care settings. In order to ensure health care facilities focus on preventing major sources of patient harm, The Joint Commission regularly revises the NPSGs based on their impact, cost, and effectiveness. Major focus areas include promoting surgical safety and preventing hospital-acquired infections, medication errors, inpatient suicide, and specific clinical harms such as falls and pressure ulcers. The 2021 NPSGs reflect no changes from the 2020 goal set. 

Innovations must be incorporated into care processes with safety in mind. This announcement shares insights to mitigate strategies that may cause patient harm through alternative use of ventilators to support multiple patients with compromised respiratory function.

As COVID-19 spreads globally, there is growing interest in methods for rapid diagnosis and the risk of diagnostic error. Delayed diagnosis of COVID-19 may lead to worse patient outcomes and increased exposure of healthy individuals to the novel coronavirus. Two early studies suggested that chest CT may have a sensitivity as high as 97%. However, higher quality studies have shown that the sensitivity of chest CT is only 67-93% among patients with viral pneumonia and imaging features must be interpreted with caution when the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection is low. Based on the risks of misdiagnosis and viral transmission, the American College of Radiology recommends that CT should not be used to screen for or as a first-line test to diagnose COVID-19. CT should be reserved for hospitalized, symptomatic patients with specific clinical indications.  

Smart pumps are widely available as a medication safety tool yet there are challenges affecting their reliable use. This guideline expands on earlier recommendations  to support smart pump use in both hospitals and the ambulatory setting. The material provides recommendations that address infrastructure, drug libraries, quality improvement data, workflow and electronic health record interoperability concerns.