Remote triage allows patients to receive guidance about whether to seek care and, if required, what level of care. This review of remote triage focuses exclusively on tele-triage studies conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. The studies reported on five broad outcome categories (access to care, triage rates, patient safety, post-triage clinical outcomes, and patient satisfaction) with highly positive outcomes.

Women’s pain has been underestimated compared to men’s pain, and treatments differ based on gender. This commentary revisits the findings from the 2001 article The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain. The authors state progress has been made in the past 20 years, but disparities still exist. Additional research is needed, particularly into chronic pain conditions that are more common in women.

Context, such as patient, clinician, location, or specialty, can affect the type and frequency of diagnostic errors. In this novel study, the diagnostic errors of a cohort of clinicians who practice in multiple locations (i.e., outpatient and emergency department) with different referral types (i.e., scheduled visit, urgent visit, emergency visit) was evaluated. Using the Revised Safer Dx instrument, researchers identified significantly more diagnostic errors in patients with scheduled visits compared to urgent or emergent referrals. The results indicate, that among clinicians in the same specialty, it may be contextual factors (i.e., referral type) that affect diagnostic errors rather than specialty.

Patient falls are associated with poorer clinical outcomes, and increased costs to the health system. This study describes the economic costs of implementing the Fall Tailoring Interventions for Patient Safety (Fall TIPS) Program in eight American hospitals. Results show the Fall TIPS program reduced falls by 19%, avoiding over $14,000 of costs per 1,000 patient days.

Speaking up about safety concerns is an important component of safety culture. In this study, nurses in a variety of fields shared their experiences with speaking up during the COVID-19 pandemic. Three themes emerged: the ability to speak up or not, anticipated consequences of speaking up, and responses, or lack thereof, from managers.

Medical scribes are increasingly being utilized to reduce the time burden on clinicians for electronic health record (EHR) documentation. In this secondary analysis, researchers identified three themes for safe use of medical scribes: communication aspects, teamwork efforts, and provider characteristics.

Healthcare workers (HCWs) who are involved in serious adverse events may feel traumatized by those events, and many organizations have implemented “second victim” training programs to support their workers. This study sought to understand HCWs’ motivations to attend such trainings and a potential association with overconfidence. Understanding the association may help organizations develop effective training programs and increase motivation to attend them.

Nurse-sensitive outcomes are important indicators of nursing safety. In this retrospective study of 600 patient records from ten Swedish home healthcare organizations, researchers found that 74% of patient safety incidents were classified as nursing-sensitive and that the majority of those events were preventable. The most common types of nursing-sensitive events were falls, pressure injuries, healthcare-associated infections, and incidents related to medication management.

Reporting and learning from adverse events is a core patient safety activity. Findings from this scoping review indicate limited evidence demonstrating that reporting and learning from near-miss events improves patient safety. The authors suggest that future research further explore this relationship and establish the effectiveness of system-level actions to avoid near misses.

Children with complex care needs present unique challenges for both parents and clinical teams. This commentary offers a physician-parent’s perspective on weaknesses in the care system that decreased medication safety for her child and also decreased patient-centeredness, including lack of a respect for the family as care team members.

Natural disasters and other public health emergencies (PHE), such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can dramatically change the delivery of healthcare. This scoping review identified considerable research examining the relationship between public health emergencies and disruptions to personal medication practices (e.g., self-altering medication regimens, access barriers, changing prescribing providers) and subsequent medication-related harm.

Home healthcare is common among older adults, who are often vulnerable to patient safety events due to factors such as medical complexity. This cross-sectional study of 4,296 Medicare patients examined the relationship between receipt of home healthcare services, perceived gaps in care coordination, and preventable adverse outcomes. The researchers found that home healthcare was not associated with self-reported gaps in care coordination, but was associated with increases in self-reported preventable drug-drug interactions (but not ED visits or hospital admissions).