Not There Yet: Patient Safety Still a Concern for Healthcare Organizations, Says Health Affairs

Patient safety and quality of care is still a problem for the U.S. healthcare system, and organizations have not yet truly achieved a blame-free safety culture in which staff feels empowered to speak up, according to a study in the November 2018 issue of Health Affairs. The authors looked at survey data from patients and nurses at 535 hospitals in four states in 2005 and 2016 to see how patient safety environments improved. Only 21% of the hospitals studied showed "sizable" improvements in terms of patient safety from 2005, the authors said, and nearly 7% of hospitals actually showed decreased patient safety scores.