Learn About Patient Safety

These resources can help you learn the basics about safety and quality.

Patient Safety

• PSNet: is a Web-based resource that features the latest news and essential resources on patient safety, including weekly literature updates, news, tools, and meetings; patient safety primers; and annotated links to important research and other information on patient safety. It also includes case reports and safety perspectives from Web M&M (Morbidity and Mortality Rounds on the Web), a peer-reviewed online journal and forum on patient safety and health care quality.
• Network of Patient Safety Databases (NPSD): includes data submitted by Patient Safety Organizations that characterize the nature of patient safety events in hospital settings, which represent the first attempt to collect this type of comprehensive data on a national scale.
• Advancing Patient Safety: A Decade of Evidence, Design, and Implementation (1999-2010): learn about AHRQ’s role in building the foundation to better understand patient safety challenges and promote rapid change.
• Making Healthcare Safer IV: A Continuous Updating of Patient Safety Harms and Practices: includes a series of 14 evidence products on patient safety practices to address different harm areas, a summary of patient safety subject matter expert recommendations for adoption, and manuscripts. An additional seven evidence products will be available by spring 2025.
• Understand the Science of Safety: this 23-minute video from the Core CUSP Toolkit explains the science of safety in health care.
• Reducing Hospital Acquired Conditions (HACs): HACs are harmful conditions that a patient develops while in the hospital being treated for something else. National efforts are underway to reduce HACs.

Quality

• Talking Quality: a resource that can help providers explain quality to consumers.
• Six Domains of Health Care Quality: a framework developed by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) for achieving a high-quality healthcare system.
• National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report: a Congressionally mandated annual report that presents trends and disparities in the effectiveness, safety, timeliness, patient-centeredness, and efficiency of care based on more than 250 measures of care.