Top Safety Issues Over the Years

If you are interested in patient safety and what are the most current concerns about patient safety, a good source to review comes out of ECRI. The ECRI Institute is a nonprofit organization, promoting patient safety and healthcare quality. The institute provides reviews of medical devices, technology assessments, patient safety guidelines, and best practices for healthcare organizations. They also provide a yearly review of the top 10 patient safety concerns. 

I thought it might be interesting to look at their evaluation of the last several years of top 10 safety concerns. There are some themes that are consistent over these last several years though some things vary. Organizations could probably spend years trying to manage each of these, to say nothing of the day to day concerns that must be managed. Despite this, there are some good lessons to be learned.

ECRI’s top 10 patient safety concerns for 2023 were as follows:

1. The pediatric mental health crisis
2. Physical and verbal violence against healthcare staff
3. Clinician needs in times of uncertainty surrounding maternal-fetal medicine
4. Impact on clinicians expected to work outside their scope of practice and competencies
5. Delayed identification and treatment of sepsis
6. Consequences of poor care coordination for patients with complex medical conditions
7. Risks of not looking beyond the “five rights” to achieve medication safety
8. Medication errors resulting from inaccurate patient medication lists
9. Accidental administration of neuromuscular blocking agents
10. Preventable harm due to omitted care or treatment

If you look at the top 10 patient safety concerns in 2022, ECRI listed the following:

1. Staffing shortages
2. COVID-19 effects on healthcare workers’ mental health
3. Bias and racism in addressing patient safety
4. Vaccine coverage gaps and errors
5. Cognitive biases and diagnostic error
6. Nonventilator healthcare-associated pneumonia
7. Human factors in operationalizing telehealth
8. International supply chain disruptions
9. Products subject to emergency use authorization
10. Telemetry monitoring

Here’s the full list of ECRI’s top 10 patient safety issues for 2021:

1. Racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare
2. Emergency preparedness and response in aging services
3. Pandemic preparedness across the health system
4. Supply chain interruptions
5. Drug shortages
6. Telehealth workflow challenges
7. Improvised use of medical devices
8. Methotrexate therapy
9. Peripheral vascular harm
10. Infection risk from aerosol-generating procedures

We are going to look at some recurrent themes in the next post (from 2020-2022).