Patient safety in ambulatory care.

Understanding of the types and frequency of errors among children in the outpatient setting is paramount. The most commonly described errors involve medical treatment, communication failures, patient identification, laboratory, and diagnostic errors. Research suggests that adverse events and near misses are frequent occurrences in ambulatory pediatrics, but relatively little is known about the types of errors, risk factors, or effective interventions in this setting.

Improving reporting of outpatient pediatric medical errors.

Objective: Limited information exists about medical errors in ambulatory pediatrics and on effective strategies for improving their reporting. We aimed to implement nonpunitive error reporting, describe errors, and use a team-based approach to promote patient safety in an academic pediatric practice.

Patients And Methods: The setting was an academic general pediatric practice in Charlotte, North Carolina, that has ∼26 000 annual visits and primarily serves a diverse, low-income, Medicaid-insured population.

Brain abnormalities detected on whole-body 18F-FDG PET in cancer patients: spectrum of findings.

Objective: The purpose of this article is to discuss and show examples of the PET appearance of common brain abnormalities that radiologists encounter when interpreting whole-body 18F-FDG PET examinations of cancer patients.

Conclusion: Knowledge of the PET appearance of various brain abnormalities can yield diagnostically relevant information in cancer patients. Detection of brain abnormalities on whole-body PET often requires adjusting window settings to reduce the intensity of normal brain FDG activity.