Identifying patients at risk for suicide has been a requirement of the National Patient Safety Goals since 2007. Since that time, inpatient suicide remains the second most frequently reported sentinel event to The Joint Commission, after wrong-site surgery.

This issue contains articles about human factors engineering, suicide risk assessment, rapid response teams and analyzing where missed opportunities occur, a column about design thinking in patient safety, and how staff safety effects patient safety.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published revised interpretive guidelines for hospitals on December 11, 2009, and this document was revised on February 5, 2010. Any hospital that accepts Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement must follow these interpretive guidelines. These...

Innovation and design thinking is a fascinating methodology that holds much promise for healthcare. Although other industries, such as manufacturing and telecommunications, have harnessed the power that design thinking can hold, healthcare is just beginning to truly embrace and apply some of the...