Skip to main content

Toolkits

Patient safety toolkits provide practical applications of PSNet research and concepts for front line providers to use in their day to day work. These toolkits contain resources necessary to implement patient safety systems and protocols.

Latest Toolkits

Plymouth Meeting, PA: Institute for Safe Medication Practices; 2023.
Experience from the sharp end helps to inform safety improvement initiatives. The results from this field survey will inform the revision of a high-alert medication list used to raise awareness about certain drugs that have heightened potential to cause patient harm if used incorrectly. The deadline for submitting comments is October 20, 2023.

Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; July 2023.

Obstetric hemorrhage and severe high blood pressure during pregnancy are leading known causes of preventable maternal harms in the United States. The AHRQ Safety Program for Perinatal Care, Phase 2 developed toolkits consisting of case scenarios, slides, and facilitators guides to work in tandem to address these threats to maternal safety. The materials inform training opportunities to improve the safety culture of labor and delivery units and decrease maternal and neonatal adverse events that result from poor communication and system failures.

London, UK: NHS England; July 2023.

A strong patient safety culture needs nurturing to serve as a foundation for launching and sustaining improvements. This toolkit provides access to existing tools that support teamwork and communication, fairness, psychological safety, promotion of diversity and inclusivity, and civility as elements of a safety culture.
Fact Sheet/FAQs
Classic
Horsham, PA; Institute for Safe Medication Practices: July 2023.
Drawing on information gathered from the ISMP Medication Errors Reporting Program, this fact sheet provides a comprehensive list of commonly confused medication names, including look-alike and sound-alike name pairs. Drug name confusion can easily lead to medication errors, and the ISMP has recommended interventions such as the use of tall man lettering in order to prevent such errors. An error due to sound-alike medications is discussed in this AHRQ WebM&M commentary.

All Toolkits (267)

Published Date
PSNet Publication Date
Displaying 1 - 20 of 267 Results
Plymouth Meeting, PA: Institute for Safe Medication Practices; 2023.
Experience from the sharp end helps to inform safety improvement initiatives. The results from this field survey will inform the revision of a high-alert medication list used to raise awareness about certain drugs that have heightened potential to cause patient harm if used incorrectly. The deadline for submitting comments is October 20, 2023.

Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; July 2023.

Obstetric hemorrhage and severe high blood pressure during pregnancy are leading known causes of preventable maternal harms in the United States. The AHRQ Safety Program for Perinatal Care, Phase 2 developed toolkits consisting of case scenarios, slides, and facilitators guides to work in tandem to address these threats to maternal safety. The materials inform training opportunities to improve the safety culture of labor and delivery units and decrease maternal and neonatal adverse events that result from poor communication and system failures.

London, UK: NHS England; July 2023.

A strong patient safety culture needs nurturing to serve as a foundation for launching and sustaining improvements. This toolkit provides access to existing tools that support teamwork and communication, fairness, psychological safety, promotion of diversity and inclusivity, and civility as elements of a safety culture.
Fact Sheet/FAQs
Classic
Horsham, PA; Institute for Safe Medication Practices: July 2023.
Drawing on information gathered from the ISMP Medication Errors Reporting Program, this fact sheet provides a comprehensive list of commonly confused medication names, including look-alike and sound-alike name pairs. Drug name confusion can easily lead to medication errors, and the ISMP has recommended interventions such as the use of tall man lettering in order to prevent such errors. An error due to sound-alike medications is discussed in this AHRQ WebM&M commentary.
Department of Health and Human Services, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Department of Defense.
Effective teamwork plays an essential role in providing safe patient care. The Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS) program was developed inititally in collaboration by the United States Department of Defense and AHRQ in order to support effective communication and teamwork in health care. The 3.0 version of the widely implemented program is organized around 5 key strategies: patient focus, integrated platform, modular course design, active adult learning and emergent team challenges and opportunities. It provides new tools to measure its impact, supports increased emphasis on the role of patients in teams, and includes a new pocket guide. A PSNet WebM&M commentary discussed how improved teamwork and shared decision-making might have prevented a missed diagnosis of sepsis that lead to the death of a patient.

Maxwell A. Washington, DC: US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Inspector General; July 2023. Report no. OEI-06-21-00031.

Trigger tools are a strategy for identifying and classifying patient injuries associated with care. This toolkit provides guidance for problem exploration on 29 specific clinical conditions. The document is designed to assist teams in the review of medical record data resources that can elucidate preventability and identify harm. This toolkit provides an 18-element trigger tool oriented to hospitals with worksheets to translate its use to a variety of care environments.
Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; October 2020.
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.
Fact Sheet/FAQs
Oakbrook Terrace, IL: Joint Commission. 2002-2023.
A series of patient safety brochures, videos and infographics directed toward specific areas of care that encourages patients to take an active role by asking questions and addressing problems with their providers. Topics include preventing falls, medication safety, and safe surgery. Available in both English and Spanish.
Measurement Tool/Indicator
Classic
Rockville MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; 2020.
Culture has been described as a key to establishing high reliability organizations. The National Quality Forum's Safe Practices for Healthcare and the Leapfrog Group both mandate hospitals to regularly assess their safety culture. This AHRQ Web site provides validated safety culture survey tools (Hospital, Medical Office, Nursing Home, Community Pharmacy, Ambulatory Surgery Center), user guides health care organizations can use to implement the surveys and a bibliography of articles discussing the use of SOPS in the field. Organizations can also use the AHRQ database to compare their Surveys on Patient Safety Culture™ (SOPS®) results. In addition, reports are available that summarize the benchmarking data across cohorts nationwide. An AHRQ WebM&M perspective discussed how to establish a safety culture.

Horsham, PA; Institute for Safe Medication Practices: April 2023.

Community pharmacies are common providers of medication delivery that harbor process weaknesses affecting safety. This guidance shares evidence-based steps to address problems such as wrong patient errors and lack of consistent barcode system use in the community setting.
Measurement Tool/Indicator
Joint Commission.
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.

Oregon Patient Safety Commission: 2023.

Gaslighting has been identified as a contributor to maternal mortality and morbidity. This toolkit of compiled resources aims to help inform organizational activities to establish programs and strategies to reduce the impact of disrespect, implicit bias and inequities that affect the care of pregnant persons.
Food and Drug Administration and Institute for Safe Medication Practices. Plymouth Meeting, PA; Institute for Safe Medication Practices; January 2023.
Mistakes associated with look-alike medication names are a safety concern in health care. Tall man, or mixed case, lettering is one recommended strategy to reduce confusion associated with similarities in drug names. This list includes medications recognized by clinicians and professional organizations as those suited for the application of mixed case lettering to make their use safer.

Collaborative for Accountability and Improvement Policy Committee. Seattle, WA: University of Washington; 2022

Communication and resolution programs (CRP) show promise for improving patient and clinician communication after a harmful preventable adverse event. This tool, developed by the Collaborative for Accountability and Improvement, provides a framework for organizational messaging on CRPs for patients and families.
Yount N, Edelman S, Sorra J, et al. Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; November 2022. AHRQ Publication No. 23-0011.
Improving the culture of safety within health care is an essential component of preventing or reducing errors. Designed for users of the AHRQ safety culture surveys, this updated tool will help organizations develop an action plan and proactively discuss potential barriers to safety culture improvement efforts and how to address them. The revision is structured around a 3-step process that focuses on areas to improve, initiative planning, and plan communication. The kit now includes an action plan template.

Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; October 2022.

Inappropriate antibiotic prescribing is associated with increased risk potential. This toolkit assists in simplifying the antibiotic decision-making process. It is organized around a four-point decision aide and contains resources on using a stewardship program, communicating about prescribing and applying best practices for common infectious diseases.
Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; July 2018.
The AHRQ Surveys on Patient Safety Culture™ (SOPS®) Community Pharmacy Survey and accompanying toolkit were developed to collect opinions of community pharmacy staff on the safety culture at their pharmacies.

Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; October 2022. AHRQ Publication no. 22(23)-0047-2-EF.

Delayed, wrong, and missed diagnoses are common challenges for patients, families, and clinicians, yet physicians rarely receive feedback on their actions to enhance diagnostic decision making. This publication provides clinicians with tools to assess and calibrate diagnostic performance in support of individual learning and improvement.
Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; October 2022.
This tool provides a printable template and step-by-step instructions for patients to create a visual reference for keeping track of medications.
Organizational Policy/Guidelines

London, England: NHS England; August 2022.

Effective response to medical error requires a comprehensive systemic and process-focused incident examination approach to ensure organizational learning. This framework will replace the current method used by the UK National Health Service (NHS) to support overarching patient safety strategic aims for the agency.