OBJECTIVES Although most health care interactions in the developed world occur in general practice, most of the literature on patient safety has focused on secondary care services. To address this issue, we have constructed a patient safety toolkit for English general practices. We report how practice and respondent characteristics affect scores on our safety climate measure, the PC-Safequest, ...

Caregivers must assume responsibility for the safety of infants, toddlers and preschoolers because children at these developmental stages have limited abilities to appraise risk and differentiate unsafe from safe situations. Historically, research on child safety has focused on what safety practices caregivers adopt, why they do so, and how to motivate them to enact better safety practices. 1-6...

mobilize widespread, national adoption of consensus-based best practices for specific medication safety issues that continue to cause fatal and harmful errors in patients, despite repeated warnings in ISMP publications. Hospitals can focus their medication safety efforts over the next 2 years on these best practices, which are realistic and have been successfully adopted by numerous organizatio...

BACKGROUND Given the trend toward eliminating reimbursement for "never events," hospital administrators are challenged to implement practices designed to prevent their occurrence. Little evidence exists, however, that patient safety practices, as evaluated using accreditation criteria, are related to the achievement of patient safety outcomes. PURPOSE The aim of this study was to examine the ...

OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to assess non-technical aspects of patient safety practices using non-participant observation in different clinical areas. DESIGN Qualitative study using non-participant observation and thematic analysis. SETTING Two eye care units in Uganda. PARTICIPANTS Staff members in each hospital. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES A set of observations of patient safety prac...

OBJECTIVE To present the results of an intervention trial to enhance parents' home-safety practices through pediatric safety counseling, home visits, and an on-site children's safety center where parents receive personalized education and can purchase reduced-cost products. DESIGN Pediatricians were randomized to a standard- or an enhanced-intervention group. Parents of their patients were en...

The scholarly publication of patient safety initiatives must contribute more to accelerating reliable, safe patient care. Reports of safety initiatives generally describe specific safety practices and the resulting clinical outcomes. So why is progress so slow to make patients safer? Do the reported safety practices in such reports in fact lack convincing and plausible supporting evidence? Or, ...