Pediatric Mental Health Tops ECRI’s 2023 Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns

Photo by Eric Ward on Unsplash

Each year, the ECRI Institute creates a list of top 10 patient safety concerns along with actionable recommendations for institutions to reduce these risks.

Some years, the list includes repeat offenders such as medication errors and concerns surrounding staffing. In the past few years, the list has reflected the reality of living during a global pandemic, with 2022’s top 10 concerns including clinician’s mental health, supply chain disruptions, and vaccine coverage gaps. This year’s list moves away from the pandemic somewhat, but still includes some fallout from COVID-19, with the number one concern reflecting a crisis among our youth: pediatric mental health.

According to the report:

“Concern for pediatric mental health was already high during the 2010s due to the growing use of social media, limited access to pediatric behavioral health providers, drug and alcohol use, gun violence, and socioeconomic impact, among other stressors. However, pediatric mental health issues have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, with a 29% increase in children age 3 to 17 experiencing anxiety and a 27% increase in depression in 2020 compared with 2016.”

The report lists some recommendations to confront this issue, including securing leadership support and resources to evaluate the organization’s […]

The ECRI Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns of 2019

A list grounded in data and expert opinion.

Atlantic Training/Wikimedia Commons

Each year, ECRI Institute creates a list of top 10 patient safety concerns in order “to support organizations in their efforts to proactively identify and respond to threats to patient safety.”

The list isn’t generated out of thin air. The ECRI Institute relies both on data regarding events and concerns and on expert judgment. Since 2009, ECRI and partner patient safety organizations “have received more than 2.8 million event reports.”

2019 Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns

  1. Diagnostic Stewardship and Test Result Management Using EHRs
  2. Antimicrobial Stewardship in Physician Practices and Aging Services
  3. Burnout and Its Impact on Patient Safety
  4. Patient Safety Concerns Involving Mobile Health
  5. Reducing Discomfort with Behavioral Health
  6. Detecting Changes in a Patient’s Condition
  7. Developing and Maintaining Skills
  8. Early Recognition of Sepsis across the Continuum
  9. Infections from Peripherally Inserted IV Lines
  10. Standardizing Safety Efforts across Large Health System

[…]

Health Technology Hazards, 2015: Alarm Issues Still Lead ECRI Top 10

hazard/jasleen kaur, via Flickr hazard/jasleen kaur, via Flickr

It’s a new year, and the ECRI Institute has released its Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for 2015 report, highlighting new health technology hazards (and some older, persistent ones) for health care facilities and nurses to keep in mind.

Alarm hazards still posed the greatest risk, topping the list at number one for the fourth year running. But this year, the report focused on different solutions. Often, according to the report, strategies for reducing alarm hazards focus on alarm fatigue—a hazard nurses have long battled. Now, the report recommends that health care facilities examine alarm configuration policies and practices for completeness and clinical relevance. These practices include:

  • determining which alarms should be enabled.
  • selecting alarm limits to use.
  • establishing the default alarm priority level.
  • setting alarm volumes.

Repeat hazards that made the list included inadequate reprocessing of endoscopes and surgical instruments (#4), robotic surgery complications due to insufficient training (#8), and, in at #2, data integrity issues such as incorrect or missing data in electronic health records and other health IT systems. For an overview of these hazards, see our posts on ECRI top 10 health technology hazards from 2013 and 2014.

And here’s an overview of new hazards that made the cut, along with some of the report’s […]

ECRI’s Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for 2014

safety Photo © One Way Stock.

For the past few years, we’ve highlighted the ECRI Institute’s annual Top 10 Health Technology Hazards report, which provides an overview of new and old technology hazards for health care facilities to keep in mind (read this year’s post here).

Now ECRI has released a new report entitled “Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for Healthcare Organizations.” The goal of the list, according to ECRI, is to “give healthcare organizations a gauge to check their track record in patient safety.” The list, which will be published on an annual basis, draws upon more than 300,000 patient safety events, custom research requests, and root-cause analyses submitted to the institute’s federally designated patient safety organization (PSO) for assessment. A selection from the top 10 can be found below.

Poor care coordination with a patient’s next level of care

The concern: Gaps in communication about patient care—for example, between hospital and provider, among providers, and between long-term care settings and hospitals—have been reported to ECRI’s PSO. And while it is best practice for hospitals to send a patient’s discharge information to all of a patient’s providers, this doesn’t always happen.

Some suggestions: On reason information doesn’t get passed on, according to the report, is that staff aren’t always […]

2016-11-21T13:04:28-05:00June 20th, 2014|Nursing|1 Comment

ECRI Conference Notes: Creating and Replicating ‘Systemness’ within Health Care Delivery

By Joyce Pulcini, PhD, RN, FAAN, Policy and Politics contributing editor, AJN

The ECRI Institute’s 19th annual conference (November 28–29) looked at system-level innovation and quality in the health care system. It brought together experts from many fields, including medicine, nursing, hospital or health system administration, informatics, health care quality, policy makers, journalists, and academics. ECRI Institute is an independent, nonprofit organization that researches the best approaches to improving the safety, quality, and cost-effectiveness of patient care. The goals of the conference were to address the following:

  1. What is “systemness”?
  2. Which elements within mature health care systems result in the best clinical outcomes?
  3. Are approaches taken by long-established systems transferable to smaller, newer, or less integrated systems?
  4. Are financial incentives enough to drive change?
  5. How can electronic health records (EHRs) help improve “systemness”?
  6. Do transformation units within health care systems produce results?

The conference essentially tried to attack in a creative way the issues around the creation of systems that function optimally. Truly changing culture and providing optimal care delivery should always result in putting the patient at the center of care. The conversation was open and the conference succeeded in fostering important dialogue among the speakers and the audience.  A major focus was on creating systems, looking at technological or financial solutions, and measuring outcomes.

The session on team care (“Creating teams to improve inter- and intra-health care systems: Does evidence show a benefit?”)  highlighted the vexing issues around how to truly foster optimal teams. Lisa Schilling, RN, MPH, VP National HC Performance Improvement, Director, Center for […]

Go to Top