Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns 2025
Learn how to identify and address patient safety concerns in your facilities
ECRI's Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns 2025 highlights the most pressing safety challenges facing both patients and staff in the coming year. This report not only identifies these critical issues but also provides actionable recommendations to address and mitigate them.
Overview
The 2025 Top 10 features many first-time topics, and emphasis is on potential risks that could have the largest impact on patients. This year's number one topic has led to misdiagnoses and delayed treatment of patients: risks of dismissing patient, family, and caregiver concerns.
The growing challenges healthcare professionals face in managing complex patients, using multiple communication technologies, and working within time constraints, can hinder empathetic, patient-centered care. This environment can lead to medical gaslighting, where clinician biases or misconceptions may result in dismissing patient symptoms, which may also be exacerbated by communication challenges.
The report also includes unique healthcare challenges in caring for veterans. Additional topics are emerging issues, while others are persistent, yet unresolved. However, all represent areas where impactful change is possible. Several Top 10 topics include:
- The growing threat of counterfeit drugs
- Medical errors and delays in care resulting from cybersecurity breaches
- Insufficient governance of artificial intelligence in healthcare
To effectively understand where vulnerabilities lie, leaders must examine all elements of the system—people, organizations, tasks and processes, tools and technology, and the physical environment. Each topic in this year's Top 10 represents a failure in at least one of these areas; in fact, many overlap and their roots are found in multiple areas.
Supporting Total Systems Safety
Total systems safety focuses on creating greater efficiency and resilience in clinical and safety operations. It incorporates principles of clinically informed human factors engineering, just culture health equity, and advanced safety science to redesign individual components of systems to be more transparent and aligned—leading to safer and more effective care.
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