Patient Safety Performance: Reversing Recent Declines through Shared Profession-Wide System-Level Solutions

Weaknesses resulting from a patchwork of patient safety processes developed by individual health care organizations over the past quarter-century, exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, can be remedied through both local systems design support and widespread best practices uniformity.

Summary

As longtime participants and contributors to the field of patient safety and as senior leaders in health systems directly dealing with patient safety issues, the authors were dismayed to watch patient safety performance decline precipitously as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic evolved. They dug deeper and identified important common elements that contributed to that decline. They also identified methods, moving forward, that would not just prevent similar losses in future crises,...