Patient Safety: Prevention of Medical Errors

• American Medical Association: Patient Safety
  Dedicated to the health of America and is addressing current health issues.
  
• Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation
  Fostering investigations that will provide a better understanding of preventable anesthetic injuries, encourage programs that will reduce the number of anesthetic injuries, and promote national and international communication of information and ideas about the causes and prevention of anesthetic injuries.
  
• Center on Patient Safety
  Mission is to advance and support the professional practice of pharmacists in hospitals and health systems and serve as their collective voice on issues related to medication use and public health.
  
• Food and Drug Administration
  Promotes and protects the public health by helping safe and effective products reach the market in a timely way, and monitoring products for continued safety after they are in use. Our work is a blending of law and science aimed at protecting consumers.
  
• Health Care: Medical Errors & Patient Safety
  Contains information about medical errors, a leading health problem, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's efforts to reduce medical errors and improve patient safety.
  
• Institute For Safe Medication Practices
  Provides an independent review of medication errors that have been voluntarily submitted by practitioners to a national Medication Errors Reporting Program (MERP) operated by the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) in the USA. Information from the reports may be used by USP to impact on drug standards. All information derived from the MERP is shared with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and pharmaceutical companies whose products are mentioned in reports.
  
• Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations
  Evaluates and accredits nearly 18,000 health care organizations and programs in the United States. An independent, not-for-profit organization, JCAHO is the nation's predominant standards-setting and accrediting body in health care.
  
• Med Errors.com
  Provides information on medication errors and adverse drug events in hospitals, problems that affect millions of Americans each year-- patients, families, and clinicians.
  
• Medical Error Reduction and Patient Safety
  Offers information on medical error reduction, patient safety quality improvement solutions for consumers and providers. Healthcare adverse, sentinel events resource with root cause analysis focus. Offers a rapid consultation service.
  
• National Patient Safety Foundation
  Mission of the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) is to improve measurably patient safety in the delivery of health care.
  
• National Quality Forum
  Created to develop and implement a national strategy for health care quality measurement and reporting. A shared sense of urgency about the impact of health care quality on patient outcomes, workforce productivity, and health care costs prompted leaders in the public and private sectors to create the National Quality Forum as a mechanism to bring about national change.
  
• Nephron Information Center
  Provides information on current news, weather and safety reports. Allows patient, professionals and the public access to the vast kidney disease resources on the Web.
  
• Patient Safety Act of 1997, HR 1165
  Read the Patient Safety Act of 1997, HR 1165, introduced by Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) that focuses on major safety, quality, and workforce issues for nurses employed by health care institutions and their patients who received care in those institutions.
  
• Patient Safety Center of Inquiry
  Focus of this Center is safe mobility. Two goals for this center are: (1) To promote personal freedom and safety for frail elderly and persons with disabilities, across the continuum of care and (2) To build a "culture of safety" to support clinicians in providing safe patient care and safe working environments. The Department of Veteran's Affairs funded the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital, Tampa to establish a VISN 8 Patient Safety Center of Inquiry. The Center was funded for three years. Three other Centers, organized under the VA National Patient Safety Center, are in White Plains (VT), Cincinnati (OH), and Palo Alto (CA).
  
• Patient Safety Feature of the Virtual Learning Center
  Provides patient safety lessons that are gleaned from adverse events that may have already happened, or from "accidents that could happen". Implementation of recommended system redesigns will safeguard against the occurrence of these accidents, thus improving patient safety. As of 2/7/02 there are 63 Patient Safety Lessons In The Virtual Learning Center.
  
• Patient Safety Institute (PSI)
  Combines the power of technology and the strength of patient-provider relationships to improve care and lower the costs of healthcare. In developing the PSI system, this non-profit, collaborative and voluntary initiative has patients, physicians and hospitals united to provide strictly confidential, real time access to critical information at the point of care.
  
• Patient Safety Resources: Behavior-based solutions BST®, Inc.
  Presents behavior-based performance improvement by Behavioral Science Technology®, BST® that includes behavioral safety, quality, customer service, and leadership enhancement. This site provides background, news, discussion groups and resources for sustained, continuous behavioral improvement.
  
• Patient Safety Statistics: Legal Information
  Provides the general public with easily accessible legal and medical material. This is done in an effort to help consumers better understand any injury or medical condition that has negatively impacted their lives, along with their legal rights. InjuryBoard.com was launched in May of 2001 and is the first comprehensive personal injury web site of its kind.
  
• Professionals and Patient Safety: How to Positively Influence Change
  Provides some of the most frequently seen errors and ways HIM professionals can contribute to a downturn in the number of adverse incidents attributable to problems involving documentation or information availability.
  
• Talk About Prescriptions: National Council on Patient Information and Education
  Designed to help consumers make sound decisions about a very important, and sometimes frequent, part of good health: use of medicines. Two out of three doctor visits end with a prescription being written. While taking medicines is very common, it's not always easy to take them correctly.
  
  Last Reviewed 3/19/02