Background Pulmonary embolism (PE) is a potentially deadly disease and a diagnostic challenge in emergency departments (EDs). Established strategies exist for risk stratification and test stewardship ...

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Background Healthcare patient safety investigations inappropriately focus on individual culpability and the target of recommendations is often on the behaviours of individuals, rather than addressing ...

Objectives To assess whether, compared with previous years, hospital care became safer in 2011/2012, expressing itself in a fall in preventable adverse event (AE) rates alongside patient safety ...

Background Understaffing by nursing staff in hospitals is linked to patients coming to harm and dying unnecessarily. There is a vicious cycle whereby poor work conditions, including understaffing, can ...

Background Handoffs are a weak link in the chain of clinical care of inpatients. Within-unit handoffs are increasing in frequency due to changes in duty hours. There are strong rationales for ...

Objectives The aim of this article is to provide an estimate of the proportion of the general public reporting healthcare-related harm in Great Britain, its location, impact, responses post-harm and ...

A combined teamwork training and work standardisation intervention in operating theatres: controlled interrupted time series study ...

Safety in healthcare is a constantly moving target. As standards improve and concern for safety grows, we come to regard an increasing number of events as patient safety issues. In this respect, ...

Introduction Quality improvement (QI) is aimed at improving care. Equity is one of the six domains of healthcare quality, as defined by the Institute of Medicine. If this domain is ignored, QI ...

Objectives In the intensive care unit (ICU), antibiotics are often given longer than recommended in guidelines. A better understanding of the factors influencing antibiotic therapy duration is needed ...

Background Medication errors are the leading cause of preventable harm in healthcare. Despite proliferation of medication-related clinical decision support systems (CDSS), current systems have ...