Patient Safety Network abruptly cut by Trump administration (29 March 2025)

Summary

The Trump administration has cut all funding for the US Patient Safety Network (PSNet). PSNet is an influential and respected project within HHS that has been dedicated to decreasing medical errors through research and knowledge dissemination. The endeavour has been credited with saving lives by helping change the culture by which clinicians learn from mistakes, thereby improving care.

This article was published in Inside Medicine, a substack from Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician and public health researcher working in Boston.

Content

The announcement came a day after HHS announced plans to terminate around 10,000 of its employees. The plans also included the “merging” of AHRQ (the agency that has administered PSNet) with another agency, to “enhance research that informs the Secretary’s policies and improves the effectiveness of federal health programs.”

News of PSNet’s fate was provided by Dr. Patrick Romano, a UC Davis paediatrician who, until now, had served as the co-editor-in-chief of PSNet's Editorial Team.

PSNet attracted researchers to make contributions because of its reach and rigor, and patients because of its authority stemming from its status within HHS and the peer-review vetting that every resource on the site received prior to publication. In other words, PSNet was seen as an oasis of reliability in a messy internet.

One seasoned expert agreed. “As an Emergency Department chief at a safety net hospital, I’ve relied on… PSNet’s extensive library of evidence-based resources—from best-practice guidelines and case studies to education modules and patient safety toolkits,” Dr. Jeremiah Schuur said. “Providers at every level, from nurses and pharmacists to hospital administrators, turn to this platform for strategies that reduce errors, lower costs, and improve outcomes.”

He added that the Trump administration’s decision to close the “cornerstone” of patient safety will hurt the general public by “compromising the quality and consistency of care across the entire healthcare landscape.”

PSNet has likely saved many lives, according to Paula Griswold, the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Prevention of Medical Errors, an organisation involved in public education on patient safety. Griswold said that PSNet’s clinical goals, including infection prevention and improvements in medication safety, had already had a huge impact. But, she said, the project could even do more. “Let’s improve it, not shut it down,” she said.

Axing PSNet is counterproductive, she said, because decreasing medical errors not only improves outcomes but saves both private and public money. “To cut that off at the knees shows a complete lack of understanding of the challenges."