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.

Physical and verbal violence against healthcare workers has been identified as a sentinel event by the Joint Commission. In this secondary analysis of survey data on workplace violence (WPV), researchers explored which attributes of patient safety culture may predict healthcare workers’ experiences of WPV and burnout. Better teamwork and staffing were among the attributes associated with lower risk of WPV.

Research has shown clinicians frequently have implicit biases against patients of color, women, and transgender patients. This study used Implicit Association Tests (IAT) to evaluate implicit bias in pediatric heart transplant clinicians. Results showed these clinicians had a bias, or preference for, individuals who were White, from a higher socio-economic group, and had more education. These results are similar to other adult and pediatric clinicians.

As part of clinical learning, residents and trainees are sometimes allowed to make supervised mistakes when patient safety is not at risk. In this study, pediatric hospitalists describe potential benefits and risks of allowing failure, the process of allowing or interrupting failure, and how they decide to allow failure to happen. Consistent with previous research, patient, trainee, team, and institutional factors were identified. Additionally, caregiver/parent factors were noted.

Leadership across all levels of a health system plays an important role in patient safety. In this study, researchers administered the Safety, Communication, Operational, Reliability, and Engagement (SCORE) survey to 31 Midwestern hospitals to evaluate how leadership behaviors influenced burnout, safety culture, and engagement. Findings indicate that local leadership behaviors are strongly associated with healthcare worker burnout, safety climate, teamwork climate, workload, and intentions to leave the job.

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.

Addressing racism in healthcare is a patient safety priority. This article discusses how an active presence by hospital threat management systems (e.g., hospital-employed security, local law enforcement personnel) in pediatric emergency departments (EDs) can help ensure patient safety but also contributes to unsafe care due to racial stereotypes and threat perception among minority patients and caregivers. The authors outline patient-centered strategies at the individual-, intra-organizational-, and extra-organizational levels for responding to disruptive and violent events.

Patient engagement in healthcare is widely encouraged, but findings from some studies suggest that patient participation can have negative effects. This qualitative study with 16 patients and obstetric healthcare professionals examined the negative effects of patient participation in healthcare. Researchers identified four types of negative consequences from patient participation in safety – decreases in patient confidence, eroding of the patient-professional relationship, unwanted increases in patient responsibility, and excess time spent by professionals on the patient.

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 work environment has been linked to perceived safety culture and job satisfaction. This cross-sectional survey of licensed practical nurses (LPNs) in New Jersey found lower job satisfaction and perceived patient safety culture among LPNs working in nursing homes compared to LPNs working in other settings.

Effective teamwork is critical for patient safety and numerous training strategies exist for improving team dynamics. The labor and delivery unit of an American hospital offered Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS) training to all physicians and nurses on the ward, and assessed perceptions of teamwork and safety both before and six months after training. Results were mixed, and physician and nurse perceptions of safety significantly differed.

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.

Negative emotions can adversely impact perception of both patient safety and personal risks. In this study, emergency nurses were surveyed about their emotions (e.g., afraid, calm), emotional suppression and reappraisal behaviors, and perceived risk of personal and patient safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nurses reported feeling both positive and negative emotions, but only negative emotions were significantly associated with greater perception of risk.

Black patients who report experiencing racism in healthcare report poorer quality of care. In this text-message based study, Black and White patients discharged from the emergency department (ED) were asked about their overall quality of care and whether they perceived an impact of their race on their care. While Black patients reported high overall quality of care, 10% believed their race negatively impacted their care. The authors highlight the importance of asking about the impact of race on care to identify and reduce potential disparities.