The focus of a recent webcast reflected the heightened concern among clinicians and the general public regarding all types of healthcare-acquired infections (HAIs).

Whether as individuals, businesses, or government, we collectively spend great sums on care delivery yet obtain relatively low value in return.

You are a nurse on a busy medical-surgical unit, it’s Friday night, and you have just come on duty. You check your patients and become concerned about Mr. Z, who is scheduled for orthopedic surgery tomorrow.

Prescription drugs are a vital component of healthcare in preventing and treating illnesses

In July 2001, a 6-year-old boy died in a tragic MRI accident at the Westchester Medical Center in New York state.

The wave of hospital consolidations in the 1990s introduced many healthcare leaders to the complex issues that challenge the management of larger systems (Luke et al.,1995).

November / December 2007 Editor’s Notebook Common Themes By Susan Carr, Editor I spent half of my workdays in October attending healthcare conferences: the 24th annual conference of the International Society for Quality in Health Care (ISQua), in Boston; the Annual Conference & Exhibition of the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management (ASHRM), in Chicago; … Continued

In a series of articles in Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare, we will describe the replicable process we have used at Hunterdon Medical Center to improve patient safety and create high reliability throughout the system, focusing first on maternity care.

Increasing emphasis on patient safety has led healthcare experts to discover that most patient safety errors are due to issues with systems rather than “bad” individuals, and that some systems are more prone to errors than others.

Common sense and practical experience dictate that organizations with effective reporting systems are able to learn from smaller mishaps and incidents so as to forestall serious workplace accidents (Reason, 1997; Connell, 1998; Johnson, 2001; 2001; Sullivan, 2001).