The AMA Is Making Strides in Safety
Physician leadership and involvement
The AMA is helping physicians help patients through its Making Strides in Safety® program, which encourages physician leadership and involvement in improving patient care. As a national leader in patient safety the AMA diligently pursues initiatives that best serve the changing needs of America's physicians and patients. The AMA aims to improve patient safety by providing model programs and tools and advocating for safety-related medical school curricula and safe clinical work environments as well as supporting implementation of a new federal law designed to teach ways to prevent adverse events.
Downloadable tools from the AMA have been developed to engage and support physicians in national safety and quality initiatives and campaigns in all settings they provide care. They include toolkits on participation, implementation and health delivery systems improvement and a tip sheet on communication effectiveness (PDF). Physician experts offer their advice on implementing patient safety interventions and physician leaders share their hospital's implementation strategies (PDF).
Learn more
- Participation toolkit (PDF), which provides step-by-step instructions on how to get started
- Implementation toolkit (PDF), which assists involvement in the program
- Systems improvement toolkit (PDF), which contains steps for improving patient safety in hospitals
- Communications (SBAR) tip sheet (PDF), for improving hospital staff communication
Making strides in medical product safety: safety alerts for drugs, biologics, devices, and dietary supplements
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a growing number of electronic tools available for physicians to access important safety information about drugs you may prescribe or other medical products that you may use. Our AMA is supportive of FDA's efforts to provide physicians with important medical product safety information in a timely, science-based, and clinically relevant manner. Our AMA recommends that you consider subscribing to the FDA's MedWatch listserv notification or RSS news feeds, and to bookmark the FDA's MedWatch Safety Information site. In additon, you may want to download audio broadcasts (podcasts) that the FDA may do on a specific medical product safety issue. Finally, the FDA is working with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to make available to physicians, free-of-charge, updated prescription drug labels (package inserts) on the NLM's DailyMed Web site. Patient safety is a key strategic issue for our AMA. Being informed in a timely manner about new and important drug and other medical product safety information is a necessary step to ensuring our patient's safety. Our AMA encourages you to take advantage of the FDA's electronic tools to help us protect our patients.
Patients and physicians: partnering for better healthcare and safer outcomes
The AMA and the AARP are asking patients to be a partner in their care. An announcement of the joint effort offers a new downloadable resource outlining physician-patient responsibilities for better health care and safer outcomes. (PDF)
