Making Health Care Safer II: An Updated Critical Analysis of the Evidence for Patient Safety Practices
April 11, 2013An expert panel has identified 22 patient safety practices that have been shown to be implementable and have enough evidence of effectiveness to be recommended for adoption by healthcare organizations now, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ) recently released report, Making Health Care Safer II: An Updated Critical Analysis of the Evidence for Patient Safety Practices, an update of the original 2001 report. While patient safety efforts have increased substantially since the seminal 1999 Institute of Medicine report, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, and the original AHRQ report on patient safety practices, many have questioned whether these efforts have made healthcare safer. As such, AHRQ commissioned a team composed of researchers from RAND Corporation, Stanford University, University of California-San Francisco, Johns Hopkins University, and ECRI Institute to examine the evidence for 41 patient safety practices (18 practices received an in-depth review, while 23 were briefly reviewed).