Safe Practices for Better Health Care

Excerpt

Modern health care is highly complex, high risk, and error prone. Not surprisingly, health care errors and consequent adverse events are a leading cause of death and injury, even though well-documented methods to prevent the occurrence of many of these errors are available. The recent heightened attention that has been focused on medical errors has sparked interest in the use of health care practices that reduce the risk of harm resulting from the processes, systems, or environments of care, i.e., Safe Practices. At the request of—and with funding from—the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the National Quality Forum (NQF) identified more than 220 candidate Safe Practices. Through its formal consensus development process, the NQF endorsed 30 evidence-based Safe Practices that should be universally employed in applicable clinical care settings to reduce the risk of errors and harm to patients. In addition, the NQF identified 27 promising practices that should be high priority for further research. This report identifies the 30 NQF-endorsed Safe Practices and describes some key aspects of the process used by the NQF in endorsing these first-ever national voluntary consensus standards for patient safety practices.