The Top Patient Safety Strategies That Can Be Encouraged for Adoption Now

Over the past 12 years, since the publication of the Institute of Medicine's report, “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System,” improving patient safety has been the focus of considerable public and professional interest. Although such efforts required changes in policies; education; workforce; and health care financing, organization, and delivery, the most important gap has arguably been in research. Specifically, to improve patient safety we needed to identify hazards, determine how to measure them accurately, and identify solutions that work to reduce patient harm. A 2001 report commissioned by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, “Making Health Care Safer: A Critical Analysis of Patient Safety Practices” (1), helped identify some early evidence-based safety practices, but it also highlighted an enormous gap between what was known and what needed to be known

The Top Patient Safety Strategies That Can Be Encouraged for Adoption Now

Over the past 12 years, since the publication of the Institute of Medicine's report, “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System,” improving patient safety has been the focus of considerable public and professional interest. Although such efforts required changes in policies; education; workforce; and health care financing, organization, and delivery, the most important gap has arguably been in research. Specifically, to improve patient safety we needed to identify hazards, determine how to measure them accurately, and identify solutions that work to reduce patient harm. A 2001 report commissioned by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, “Making Health Care Safer: A Critical Analysis of Patient Safety Practices” (1), helped identify some early evidence-based safety practices, but it also highlighted an enormous gap between what was known and what needed to be known

Advancing the Science of Patient Safety

Waiting for permission from publisher.Despite a decade's worth of effort, patient safety has improved slowly, in part because of the limited evidence base for the development and widespread dissemination of successful patient safety practices. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality sponsored an international group of experts in patient safety and evaluation methods to develop criteria to improve the design, evaluation, and reporting of practice research in patient safety. This article reports the findings and recommendations of this group, which include greater use of theory and logic models, more detailed descriptions of interventions and their implementation, enhanced explanation of desired and unintended outcomes, and better description and measurement of context and of how context influences interventions. Using these criteria and measuring and reporting contexts will improve the science of patient safety