Search the hub

ECRI’s list of patient safety concerns for 2020: 1. Missed and delayed diagnoses—Diagnostic errors are very common. Missed and delayed diagnoses can result in patient suffering, adverse outcomes, and death. 2. Maternal health across the continuum—Approximately 700 women die from childbirth-related complications each year in the U.S. More than half of these deaths are preventable. 3. Early recognition of behavioural health needs—Stigmatisation, fear, and inadequate resources can lead to negative outcomes when working with behavioural health patients. 4. Responding to and learning from device problems—Incidents involving medical devices or equipment can occur in any setting where they might be found, including ageing services, physician and dental practices, and ambulatory surgery. 5. Device cleaning, disinfection, and sterilisation—Sterile processing failures can lead to surgical site infections, which have a 3% mortality rate and an associated annual cost of $3.3 billion. 6. Standardising safety across the system—Policies and education must align across care settings to ensure patient safety. 7. Patient matching in the EHR—Organisations should consistently use standard patient identifier conventions, attributes, and formats in all patient encounters. 8. Antimicrobial stewardship—Over prescribing of antibiotics throughout all care settings contributes to antimicrobial resistance. 9. Overrides of Automated Dispensing Cabinets (ADC)—Overrides to remove medications before pharmacist review and approval lead to dangerous and deadly consequences for patients. 10. Fragmentation across care settings—Communication breakdowns result in readmissions, missed diagnoses, medication errors, delayed treatment, duplicative testing and procedures, and dissatisfaction.

The findings of this paper show that safety lapses in primary and ambulatory care are common. About half of the global burden of patient harm originates in primary and ambulatory care, and estimates suggest that nearly four out of ten patients experience safety issue(s) in their interaction with this setting. Safety lapses in primary and ambulatory care most often result in an increased need for care or hospitalisations. Available evidence estimates the direct costs of safety lapses – the additional tests, treatments and health care – in primary and ambulatory care to be around 2.5% of total health expenditure. Safety lapses resulting in hospitalisations each year may count 6% of total hospital bed days and more than 7 million admissions in the OECD.

The guide includes: How to select, implement and evaluate the guide’s strategies. How patient and family engagement can benefit your hospital. How senior hospital leadership can promote patient and family engagement. Strategy 1: Working with patients and families as advisors shows how hospitals can work with patients and family members as advisors at the organisational level. Strategy 2: Communicating to improve quality helps improve communication among patients, family members, clinicians and hospital staff from the point of admission. Strategy 3: Nurse bedside shift report supports the safe handoff of care between nurses by involving the patient and family in the change of shift report for nurses. Strategy 4: IDEAL discharge planning helps reduce preventable readmissions by engaging patients and family members in the transition from hospital to home.