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Achieving diagnostic safety requires multidisciplinary approaches. Based on interviews with safety leaders across the United States, this article discusses how different organizations approach diagnostic safety. Respondents discuss barriers to implementing diagnostic safety activities as well as strategies to overcome barriers, highlighting the role of patient engagement and dedicated diagnostic safety champions.

Hospital readmission rates are an important indicator of patient safety. This cross-sectional study examined whether patients admitted to hospitals with high readmission rates also had higher risks of in-hospital adverse events. Based on a sample of over 46,000 Medicare patients with pneumonia discharged between July 2010 and December 2019 and linked to Medicare adverse event data, researchers found that patients admitted to hospitals with high all-cause readmission rates were more likely to experience an adverse event during their admission.

Parents have reported the importance of being involved in discussions with clinicians following adverse events involving their children. This study asked parents and physicians about their perspectives on inclusion of parents in morbidity and mortality (M&M) reviews. Similar to earlier studies, parents wished to be involved, while physicians were concerned that parent involvement would draw attention away from the overall purpose (e.g., quality improvement) of M&M conferences.

Central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI) are a target of safety improvement initiatives, as they are common and harmful. This guideline provides an update on recommended steps for organizations to support the implementation of CLASBI reduction efforts.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) use a variety of quality indicators to measure and rank hospital performance. In this study, researchers analyzed the variance between AHRQ pediatric quality indicators and CMS hospital-acquired condition indicators and evaluated the use of alternative composite scores. The researchers identified substantial within-hospital variation across the indicators and could not identify a single composite measure capable of capturing all of the variance observed across the broad range of outcomes. The authors call for additional research to identify meaningful approaches to performance ranking for children’s hospitals.

Several factors contribute to the increased risk of prescribing errors for children, including weight-based dosing and drug formulation. This quality improvement project in one pediatric emergency department identified four key drivers and implemented four interventions to reduce errors. Prescribing errors were reduced across three plan-do-study-act cycles, and improvements were maintained six months after the final cycle.

Organizations such as The Joint Commission and the Leapfrog Group require participating healthcare organizations to evaluate their patient safety culture, but surveys can represent a time burden on staff. An Illinois health system aimed to lessen this burden on staff by creating a shorter, revised survey. The final survey consisted of five questions with comparable measurement properties of the original 17-question survey; however, the authors caution the shorter survey will yield less detail than the longer version.

Telehealth is increasingly used to connect rural hospitals with specialists in other areas and can improve patient outcomes. This study found that in situ simulation training in rural emergency departments resulted in small increases in the use of telemedicine for patients presenting with sepsis and led to improvements in sepsis process care outcomes.

Dashboards provide a way to display patient safety data (e.g., medication safety) in real time. This narrative review and SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) of existing patient safety dashboards can form the basis for developing future dashboards.

Needed nursing care that is delayed, partially completed, or not completed at all is known as missed nursing care (MNC). Researchers surveyed critical care registered nurses during two phases of the COVID-19 pandemic about recent missed nursing care, perceived quality of care, and contributing factors. There were no major changes in the types of, or reasons for, MNC compared to the reference survey completed in fall 2019.

In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued an opioid prescribing guideline intended to reverse the increasing death rate from opioid overdoses. This study describes the development, implementation, and effect of a safe prescribing strategy (TOWER) in an HIV-focused primary care setting. Providers using TOWER were more adherent to the CDC guidelines, with no worsening patient-reported outcome measures.

Achieving high reliability is a goal for every healthcare organization. Based on interviews with hospital leadership, clinicians, and staff, this study explored how healthcare professionals understand and perceive high-reliability principles. Findings indicate that some principles are more supported than others and identified inconsistent understanding of principles across different types of healthcare professionals.

A 2011 systematic review identified nine tools to assess patient safety competence in nurses. This review identified multiple instruments released since that review; the most frequently used was the Health Professional Education in Patient Safety Survey (H-PEPSS). The authors suggest future research should consider including ethics in patient safety and responsiveness to change over time.