The 1999 Institute of Medicine report raised public awareness of the frequency and cost of adverse drug events in medicine. In response, in November 2000 a coalition of healthcare purchasers announced ...

Healthcare workers could learn much from the engineering and civil aviation industries about safety management. The medical community is becoming more open to learning safety lessons from other ...

BMJ Quality & Safety - Our Full Story 12 March 2024 Listen to Editors-in-Chief of BMJ Quality & Safety, Bryony Dean Franklin and Eric Thomas, talk about the journal's aims and scope, the advice they ...

In the past 15 years, SEIPS (Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety)1–3 and related conceptual models4 5 were developed to study and improve healthcare. These theoretical models depict how ...

Background There is strong evidence to show that lower nurse staffing levels in hospitals are associated with worse patient outcomes. One hypothesised mechanism is the omission of necessary nursing ...

Background: Laryngospasm is usually easily detected and managed, but may present atypically and/or be precipitated by factors which are not immediately recognised. If poorly managed, it has the ...

Patients, clinicians and managers all want to be reassured that their healthcare organisation is safe. But there is no consensus about what we mean when we ask whether a healthcare organisation is ...

Diagnostic errors are associated with patient harm and suboptimal outcomes. Despite national scientific efforts to advance definition, measurement and interventions for diagnostic error, diagnosis in ...

The goal of improving patient safety has led to a number of paradigms for directing improvement efforts. The main paradigms to date have focused on reducing injuries, reducing errors, or improving ...

Background Quality improvement (QI) efforts have become widespread in healthcare, however there is significant variability in their success. Differences in context are thought to be responsible for ...

If the core aim of a healthcare system is to minimise both illness and treatment burden while reducing the costs of care delivery, then we must accept, however reluctantly, that our efforts are ...

Background Non-adherence to medications continues to be a burden worldwide, with significant negative consequences. Community pharmacist interventions seem to be effective at improving medication ...