PSQH Quick Poll 2025: Taking the Pulse of Patient Safety

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By Jay Kumar

As part of PSQH’s celebration of Patient Safety Awareness Week, we decided to reach out to our readers with a few questions to find out the state of patient safety efforts in 2025. This PSQH Quick Poll is presented in partnership with IAC, Inovalon, and Origami Risk.

The survey had a total of 212 respondents.

Strengthening Nursing’s Role in Quality and Patient Safety

Asked about how their organizations can help strengthen nursing’s role in quality and patient safety efforts, 69% of respondents said more education and training is needed and the same percentage said mentoring from leadership was necessary. In addition, 35% said more leadership opportunities for nurses would be helpful and 33% called for increased emotional support. Other write-in responses included:

  • Leadership buy-in and support
  • Strong expert nurses that stay with a new orientee or novice nurse for a specific period of time in order to secure clinical competence.
  • Accountability.
  • There is just too much turnover that you cannot keep experienced staff. They’ve reduced clinician roles, leading to lack of oversight by seasoned professionals, particularly on off shifts. We need to find a way to better capture patient acuity as it applies to staff assignments also. I would also like to see greater funding for technology to support staff and safety efforts.
  • Supportive environment.
  • Increase in opportunities to participate in quality and patient safety initiatives.
  • Blend bedside and decision making together and ask their ideas for AI.
  • Listen to nurses regarding safe nurse-to-patient ratios. Offer eight-hour shifts to decrease fatigued nurses.
  • Engaging frontlines to participate in building foundation and structures.
  • Support for positive system changes.
  • Feedback on report. What happens after the events?
  • Education focused on their specific role and the why.
  • Humanity and integrity.
  • Paid time for hourly bedside staff to attend.
  • More power at the higher levels in the organization.
  • A robust event reporting system and “suggestion box” with a strong feedback loop and support.
  • Simulation-based training that allows for practice in maintaining situational awareness, speaking up behavior, etc.
  • Increased involvement with impactful real projects.
  • Employ human factors engineers.
  • Provide for a specialization position throughout the orgs, unit based, whose full focus is identifying and mitigating gaps in care and service delivery.
  • Ensure they will be safe when reporting problems.
  • Not seeing unsafe staffing ratios as a financial win.
  • Mentoring from seasoned nurses.

Preparedness for the Winter Respiratory Disease Season

Asked about their organization’s preparedness for this winter’s respiratory disease season, 51% of respondents said they were very prepared while another 47% said they were somewhat prepared. Only 2% said they were not prepared.

Concern About the Bird Flu Outbreak

When asked about their level of concern regarding the current bird flu outbreak, 57% of respondents said they were somewhat concerned, 27% said they were not concerned, and 16% were very concerned.

Workplace Violence

Workplace violence continues to be a major issue in healthcare. Asked about their level of concern regarding workplace violence, 50% said they were very concerned, 36% were somewhat concerned, and 14% were not concerned.

AI in Healthcare

Asked about their feelings on the use of artificial intelligence (AI), 55% of respondents said they were both excited and concerned about AI, 21% were concerned about the risks involved, 15% were excited about the possibilities of using AI to improve efficiency in provision of care, and 9% said they didn’t know enough about AI to have an opinion yet.

Issues That Need More Focus

Asked which issues their organization needed to focus on more, 33% of respondents said staff retention, 21% said care transitions between settings, 18% said workplace violence,10% said diagnostic errors, and 3% said opioids and drug diversion. Write-in responses included:

  • Medication errors and preventing them.
  • Staff retention, drug diversion, and workplace violence.
  • Reducing overall safety events.
  • Focus more on quality and safety versus revenue. Open a dialog between nursing and leadership to ensure safe staffing levels and ways to reduce nursing fatigue.
  • Patient flow, ED boarding.
  • Administrative participation in the toxic work environment retains the most toxic at the cost of the good.
  • Leadership.
  • Implementation of HRO and Just Culture principles.
  • Systems engineering.
  • Electronic record has isolated providers, care lacks coordination.
  • CMS patient safety measures.
  • Staff engagement in required quality, safe care.
  • Hospital-acquired infections.
  • Appropriate communication from higher-ups to staff.