AHRQ Patient Safety Network

The Agency for Research and Quality has developed the Patient Safety Network (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.- a repository of articles, videos and guides related to safety in healthcare.

Primers (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. are provided at the included links. Each primer defines a topic, offers background information on its epidemiology and context, and highlights relevant content from both AHRQ PSNet and AHRQ WebM&M.

Some topics include adverse events after hospital discharge (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., detection of safety hazards (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., and root cause analysisnks to an external site.)Links to an external site.

WHO International Conceptual Patient Safety (ICPS) framework

The WHO International Conceptual Patient Safety (ICPS) framework (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.is a convergence of international perceptions of the main issues of patient safety, to facilitate the description, comparison, measurement, monitoring, analysis and interpretation of information to improve patient care. It aims to represent a continuous learning and improvement cycle emphasizing identification of risk, prevention, detection, reduction of risk, incident recovery and system resilience; all of which occur throughout any point, within the conceptual framework.

The 10 high-level classes are: 1. Incident type; 2. Patient outcomes; 3. Patient characteristics; 4. Incident characteristics; 5. Contributing factors; 6. Organizational outcomes; 7. Detection; 8. Mitigating factors; 9. Ameliorating actions; 10. Actions taken to reduce risk.

Our dental patient safety toolkit shares a similar cycle of identification of risk, detection from previous events, and aims to similarly improve prevention and reduction of risk.