Textbook of Patient Safety and Clinical Risk Management

Implementing safety practices in healthcare saves lives and improves the quality of care: it is therefore vital to apply good clinical guidelines, such as the WHO surgical and childbirth checklist, to adopt the most appropriate practices for the prevention of assistance-related risks, and to identify the potential ones using tools such as reporting & learning systems.

The culture of safety in the care environment and of human factors influencing it should be developed from the beginning of medical studies and in the first years of professional practice, in order to have the maximum impact on clinicians' and nurses' behavior. Medical errors tend to vary with the level of proficiency and experience, and this must be taken into account in adverse events prevention. Human factors assume a decisive importance in resilient organizations, and an understanding of risk control and containment is fundamental for all medical and surgical specialties.

This open access book reports the patient-safety experiences of residents and students who took part in the international meeting on safety and quality of care, held in Florence in 2018 and organized by the Tuscany Region Center for Clinical Risk Management and Patient Safety in collaboration with the World Health Organization.

Intended for residents and young professionals in different clinical specialties, it offers recommendations and examples of how to improve patient safety by changing practices, introducing organizational and technological innovations, and creating effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable care systems, in order to spread the quality and patient safety culture among the new generation of healthcare professionals.