Ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) are increasingly being used to provide surgical care. The AHRQ Surveys on Patient Safety Culture™ (SOPS®) Ambulatory Surgery Center Survey seeks opinions from the field regarding safety culture in the ambulatory surgical center environment. The survey is presented with additional resources to help organizations assess their safety culture, including the results of a pilot program testing the survey and a user's guide. Voluntary data submission will be open June 1-22 for ASCs that have administered the survey.

This website provides sentinel event data reported to The Joint Commission, which includes information on sentinel events reported from January through December 2022. Falls, unintended retained foreign bodies, and delays in treatment were among the most frequently submitted incidents in this time period which represents a 19% increase over 2021. The data and graphs are updated regularly and include a 5 year trend analysis and specific analysis associated with event type by year from 2018 through 2022.

The perioperative setting is a high-risk area for medication errors, should they occur. This assessment provides hospitals and outpatient surgical providers a tool to examine their medication use processes and share data nationwide for comparison. Organizational participation can identify strengths and gaps in their systems to design opportunities that prevent patient harm. 

Voluntary reporting systems collect adverse event data to inform improvement and education efforts. This site provides a platform for physicians and their staff to submit adverse experiences associated with dermatologic surgery equipment, medications or biologics.

Preventing surgical complications including surgical site infections are a worldwide target for improvement. This toolkit builds on the success of the Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program to initiate change. The tools represent practical strategies that helped members of a large-scale collaborative to identify areas of weakness, design improvements, and track the impact of the interventions.

Ambulatory surgery centers provide care to growing numbers of patients. This toolkit draws from AHRQ's Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program to help ambulatory surgical center teams develop communication and teamwork skills to reduce infections and other iatrogenic harms.

Patient engagement is a promising strategy for error reduction and has become a priority of influential regulatory and governmental organizations. This Web site offers tips to help patients improve their safety, including bringing a friend or family member to appointments, asking questions prior to surgery, and keeping an accurate medication list.

This initiative provides a surgical safety checklist and related educational and training materials building on the Second Global Patient Safety Challenge vision to encourage international adoption of a core set of safety standards. Implementation of this World Health Organization’s checklist has resulted in dramatic reductions in surgical mortality and complications across diverse international hospitals. Surgical checklists have now become one of the clearest success stories in the patient safety movement, although some have described challenges to effective implementation. Dr. Atul Gawande discussed the history of checklists as a quality and safety tool in his book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.

The Joint Commission requires time outs prior to surgical incision. This Web site includes information and resources for National Time Out Day, an initiative to raise awareness on the importance of surgical team time outs. The annual observation is in June.

This tip sheet provides 10 practical steps hospitals can undertake to improve patient safety, based on research funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The tips can be grouped into three areas: 1) reducing health care-acquired infections and retained surgical instruments through use of specific clinical practices; 2) improving drug safety by ensuring access to accurate drug information; and 3) improving the culture of safety through appropriate staffing and work hours for nurses and residents. These tips are based on high-quality research studies documenting the effectiveness of these interventions at reducing errors and improving safety for a broad range of patients.

This tip sheet provides a list of questions consumers should ask clinicians to help improve the safety of their surgical care.

This fact sheet provides information regarding the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' initiative to better understand and minimize never events.

This pamphlet informs consumers on steps both patients and clinicians should take prior to surgery to ensure safety.

This AHRQ brochure provides practical advice for patients facing non-emergent surgery, to help them be generally informed about the procedure, aware of the risks, and prepared to contribute to the safety of their experience.

This consumer fact sheet advises parents on how to help their children avoid medical errors pertaining to medicine, hospital stays, surgeries, and other medical needs.

This fact sheet for patients provides recommendations to help them prevent medical errors when taking medications, during a hospital stay, and prior to having surgery.

A brief presentation of "pearls" to allow consumers to take an active role in preventing medical errors.