Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns
Learn how to identify and address patient safety concerns in your facilities.
Understanding Today’s Most Critical Patient Safety Risks
ECRI’s Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns is an annual, evidence-based report identifying the most pressing safety challenges facing healthcare in the year ahead. The report highlights critical risks and provides actionable strategies to help healthcare leaders strengthen patient safety across their organizations.
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Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns 2026
The 2026 Top 10 reflects a shift toward broad, systemic threats that jeopardize safe, equitable, and reliable care. This year’s list emphasizes risks that span technology, infrastructure, staffing, culture, and public health—issues capable of affecting large numbers of patients and driving preventable harm.
Hear From Our Experts
Gain insight into each patient safety concern from our team of trusted experts.
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Advancing Total Systems Safety with SafeSystemSM Solutions
SafeSystem Solutions is a transformative approach that enables healthcare organizations to design and operationalize comprehensive, resilient safety systems that safeguard patients and empower clinicians—advancing the journey toward total systems safety. Grounded in human factors engineering, just culture, health equity, and safety science, SafeSystem Solutions supports systems thinking to strengthen reliability and resilience.
Through data‑driven insights and practical implementation, SafeSystem Solutions helps leaders reduce variability, anticipate risk, and align organizations around shared safety goals to drive measurable reductions in preventable harm.
To effectively understand where vulnerabilities lie, leaders must examine all elements of their systems—people, organizations, tasks and processes, tools and technology, and the physical environment. Each topic in this year’s Top 10 represents a failure in one or more of these interconnected areas.
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