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March 13, 2025
Safety First: The Renewed Priority of Protecting Patients

Safety First: The Renewed Priority of Protecting Patients

We find ourselves in the middle of Patient Safety Awareness Week (PSAW). What better time, then, to revisit this key issue with our readership. This marks the 23rd such week that we have officially observed in the U.S., and we would be remiss not to recount a bit of its history. The week is the culmination of the vision and efforts of concerned citizens, including an individual whose child died due to preventable medical error. At some point, the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) came into the picture and continues to sponsor the event to this day.

Safety First: The Renewed Priority of Protecting Patients

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Writing for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)—a partner in sponsoring PSAW—Patricia McGaffigan, MS, RN, CPPS (President of the Certification Board for Professionals in Patient Safety), points out the “power of A” when it comes to patient safety: 

    • Awareness.  Raise awareness for yourself, your organization, and the communities served on what matters for constancy of purpose and transformation of safety by reviewing Safer Together: A National Action Plan to Advance Patient Safety, the CMS Patient Safety Structural Measure(PSSM), and the aims of the HHS National Action Alliance for Patient and Workforce Safety (NAA). Regardless of whether your organization is subject to the PSSM, each of these initiatives offers essential guidance to realize and sustain safety.  
    • Assessment.  Convene a team, inclusive of patient and family representation, to assess your organization’s current strengths and opportunities for improvement using the Safer Together Organizational Self-Assessment Tool. If applicable, this assessment will help gauge your organization’s performance compared to the PSSM. 
    • Action.  Informed by your self-assessment, take action to create and enact improvement plans, develop measurement and evaluation strategies, and identify accountability owners and processes to steward safety progress.  

IHI will be kicking off PSAW 2025 in San Diego with its annual Patient Safety Congress, “the premiere patient safety event of the year,” according to McGaffigan. It will include conference tracks, sessions and networking events.

Hopefully, these and other events, conferences and emphases during this week—and, ideally, throughout the year—will build on the improved patient safety numbers that we saw last year. Our readers may recall that, in 2024, the American Hospital Association (AHA) produced a report that showed improvement across a number of indicators when comparing pre-pandemic levels to those in the first quarter of last year. The key takeaways of that report included the following:

    • Despite being sicker and more complex, hospitalized patients in the first quarter of 2024 were on average over 20 percent more likely to survive than expected given the severity of their illnesses compared to the fourth quarter of 2019.
    • While caring for sicker patients, hospitals’ efforts to improve safety led to 200,000 Americans hospitalized between April 2023 and March 2024 surviving episodes of care they wouldn’t have in 2019.
    • Hospitals’ central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI) and catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI) in the first quarter of 2024 were at rates lower than those recorded in the fourth quarter of 2019.
    • Not only did multiple key preventive health screenings rapidly rebound to pre-pandemic levels, but ongoing improvement led to a 60-to-80-percent increase in breast, colon and cervical cancer screenings in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the fourth quarter 2019.

So, we are trending in the right direction, and our readers are encouraged to continue this momentum by getting informed and involved as it concerns patient safety-specific tools, training and implementation strategies. There is always something new to learn. There is always some protocol to tweak. There is always some metric to improve. Your dedication to continued improvement is our best hope for happier hospital stays.