Organizations are encouraged to proactively identify patient safety risks and learn from failures. This article describes validity testing of systems-thinking risk assessment (Net-HARMS) to identify risks associated with patient medication administration and an accident analysis method (AcciMap) to analyze a medication administration error.

Medical students do not always feel competent when it comes to patient safety concepts. In this study of German medical students, most understood the importance of patient safety, though few could identify concrete patient safety topics, such as near miss events or conditions that contribute to errors. Incorporating patient safety formally into medical education could improve students’ competence in these concepts.

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.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plays an important role in ensuring the safety of medical devices. In this cross-sectional study, researchers identified a high risk of future Class 1 FDA recall (the most serious recall designation, indicating serious risks to patient safety) among previously authorized devices (predicates) with prior Class 1 recalls.

Healthcare workers (HCW) and patients can experience negative psychological impacts following medical error; the negative impact can be compounded when workers and patients are prevented from processing the error. This study explored interactions between patients/families and HCWs following a medical error, highlighting barriers to communication, as well as the need for training and peer support for HCWs. Importantly, HCW and patients/families expressed feeling empathy towards the other and stressed that open communication can lead to healing for some.

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically impacted healthcare delivery and raised concerns about exacerbating existing patient safety challenges. Based on incident reporting data from three large US academic medical centers from January 2020 through December 2021, researchers found that patient safety event rates did not increase during the COVID-19 pandemic, but they did observe a relationship between staffing levels during the pandemic and patient safety event rates.

Incident reporting systems are common tools to detect patient safety hazards. This systematic review synthesized evidence from 41 studies using incident reporting system data to identify and characterize critical incidents. Medication-related incidents and incidents due to “active failures” were the most commonly reported events. The authors observe that only one in three studies reported on corrective actions due to the incidents, highlighting the need to emphasize the importance of learning from errors.

Patient engagement and encouragement to speak up about their care can promote patient safety. This qualitative study explored patients’ psychosocial experiences after surviving abdominal surgery complications. Findings highlight an overarching theme of vulnerability and how power imbalances between patients and healthcare professionals can influence speaking up behaviors.

Medical errors that receive widespread media attention frequently spur health systems to reexamine their own culture and practices to prevent similar errors. This commentary describes one health system’s effort to identify and improve the system factors (systems, processes, technology) involved in the error. The action plan proposed by this project includes ensuring a just culture so staff feel empowered to report errors and near-misses; regularly review and improve medication delivery systems; build resilient medication delivery systems; and, establish methods of investigations.

Nurses play a critical role in ensuring patient safety, and prior research has shown that better nurse-staffing ratios and nurse engagement can improve mortality rates. This study of nearly 300 Florida acute-care hospitals evaluated the effect of expenditures on continuing nurse education staffing ratios of several AHRQ Patient Safety Indicators (PSI). Increased spending on both improved outcomes in catheter-related blood stream infections, pressure ulcers, and deep vein thrombosis.

Healthcare staff who are involved in a medical error often experience emotional distress. Using qualitative methods and text mining of medication error incident reports, researchers in this study identified the negative emotions experienced by healthcare staff after a medication error (e.g., fear, guilt, sadness) and perceptions regarding how superiors and colleagues effectively responded to the events (e.g., reassurance, support, and guidance).