State health officials cited St. Luke's Hospital-Monroe Campus for failing to properly monitor a patient experiencing suicidal ideation, The Morning Call reported March 27.

U.S. Catholic bishops issued a guideline March 20 that encourages Catholic hospitals to not offer gender-affirming medical treatments. 

It's time for healthcare organizations to label health inequities as "never events" and abandon the idea that eliminating them is a "journey" or "marathon," Maulik Joshi, DrPH, president and CEO of Hagerstown, Md.-based Meritus Health, wrote in a March 25 opinion piece published in Medpage Today.

Requiring the name and phone number of the individual responsible for picking a patient up and transporting them home after a procedure involving anesthetics has been routine safety practice for years — but can it be more of a burden than a benefit?

Two recent studies found COVID-19 vaccination and Paxlovid can reduce the risk of long COVID, CNN reported March 23.

The first confirmed link between Parkinson's disease and a red brain pigment has been made by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Medication discrepancies lead to the deaths of between 7,000 and 9,000 U.S. patients each year, but collecting a consolidated medication list before admission and upon discharge can significantly reduce the frequency, a study from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston found. 

A new labor and delivery model was recently implemented at Cleveland Clinic Akron General in Ohio, making it one of only four other hospitals in the nation to take the approach. 

Further research into the effects of long COVID-19 has revealed that in addition to the myriad neurological symptoms that have been linked to the disease, face blindness may also be one of them.

Twenty-four hospitals in the U.S., Canada and Western Europe are using "black boxes" — named after the recording devices in airplanes — to collect and analyze operating-room practice data in hopes of reducing medical errors and improving patient safety and operating room efficiency, The Wall Street Journal reported March 19.

A looming shortage of biomedical technicians and engineers, plus the closure of their programs, spells concern for the profession, according to the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation.

Clinical and nonclinical healthcare workers have an upward-trending perception of safety culture, but physicians and leaders do not agree, according to a Press Ganey report released March 16. 

In just the 12 years since its establishment, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences has brought 44 FDA-approved drugs for rare diseases to the market — and it shows no signs of slowing down.

Northwestern Medicine is pioneering a new treatment for stage 4 cancer patients: double lung transplants.

The narrative that strikes threaten patient safety is not substantiated by current evidence, researchers wrote in a March 10 analysis published in The BMJ. 

The rate of maternal deaths during or shortly after pregnancy rose 40 percent in 2021, making the U.S. the most dangerous place among high-income countries to give birth, The Wall Street Journal reported March 16.

Tampa (Fla.) General Hospital's Heart and Vascular Institute has opened a new clinic designated to house what it claims is the "first and only" limb preservation program in the region. 

The FDA reviewed Pfizer's mid-to-late stage clinical trials of Paxlovid and found "no evidence of a higher rate of symptom rebound or moderate symptom rebound."

Quality patient outcomes cannot happen without safety as a foundation, Karla Miller, MD, Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare's chief patient safety officer, wrote in a March 13 blog post. The hospital operator, like many others, emphasizes patient safety as a key responsibility for its 294,000 employees, and now it is incorporating new measures to deepen these efforts.

A refreshed federal report shows the healthcare industry's efforts to improve care quality is lagging, with only 44 percent of quality measures improving over the past two decades.