By Healthcare Facilities Today

Nearly 15 years after the patient-safety movement started, deaths and injuries from poor care continue to be all too common in U.S. hospitals, according to an article on the Modern Healthcare website.

To address this issue, a set of 10 patient-safety practices were strongly recommended by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in its report issued earlier this year.

The report, Making Health Care Safer II: An Updated Critical Analysis of Patient Safety Practices, includes practices that were found to show evidence of effectiveness in real-world use.

Despite the evidence, however, experts say compliance is far from universal. Instead, compliance varies greatly from one hospital to another—and within each hospital, according to the article.

“Even if you are talking about an individual organization, there will be certain areas where it's practiced beautifully, some where it's practiced pretty well, and some that may not be practicing it at all,” says Carol Haraden, a vice president at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

The only antidote to poor compliance with safety practices is leadership from the executive ranks, and there hasn't been enough of that. “The more sophisticated groups understand that this is a job for leadership because no individual can make this happen,” she said in the article.

“It really has to emanate from the top.” Some of the practices on AHRQ's top 10 list — proper hand hygiene for example — seem so basic that outside observers may assume that compliance is universal, according to the article.

Those who understand patient safety the best say that's not so.

Read the article.

Read the study.