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There is a long-standing tension between health care regulation and just culture principles. This qualitative study explored the experiences of mental health professionals, managers and other healthcare organization staff, as well as inspectors, regarding the role of healthcare inspectors in enabling a just culture. Three themes emerged – (1) the role of the inspector as both a catalyst for learning and a potential barrier, (2) just culture involves relationships between different layers within and outside the organization, and (3) to enable just culture in which inspectors would strike a balance between organizational responsibility and timely regulatory intervention.

Fear of criminal liability may inhibit clinicians from reporting medical errors, thereby reducing opportunities for learning. This commentary discusses recent legal actions brought against clinicians, including Tennessee nurse RaDonda Vaught, and the negative impact such actions may have on the longstanding disclosure movement.

Accreditation programs such as The Joint Commission are intended to improve patient safety and quality. Investigators evaluated the evidence base for 20 actionable standards issued by The Joint Commission. Standards were classified by the extent to which they were supported by evidence, evidence quality ratings, and the strength of the recommendation.

Healthcare systems have implemented communication-and-resolution programs (CRPs) to respond and disclose serious errors and adverse events. This article describes methods used by nine teams of CRP advocates to encourage adoption and endorsement by hospitals and national medical societies at the national, state, and local levels.  

This article takes a holistic view of the multiple preventable failures of the U.S. in managing the COVID-19 pandemic, raising several patient safety issues from the metasystems perspective. The piece highlights systemic problems such as lack of transparency, investment in public health and learning from experience.

Managing errors that affect patients who lack decision-making capacity and a designated decision-maker is a new area of concern. This commentary discusses moral, ethical, legal, and clinical reasons for health care to examine how to respond when such a situation occurs. The authors hope to motivate development of needed protocols and best practices to ensure that this vulnerable patient population is respectfully and completely informed after medical errors.

Large-scale system failures can damage an organization's credibility. This commentary analyzes how one organization responded after an incident that involved 76 patients who mistakenly received fatally high doses of radiation. The strategies discussed center on the importance of organizational communication to patients, navigating the blame response, and rapid efforts to prevent similar events.