Leadership and support for safety.

This is the second in a series of seven articles on the National Patient Safety Agency's Seven Steps to Patient Safety (NPSA 2004a). Leadership and support for staff can be achieved by ensuring that patient safety has a clear focus throughout the organisation. This article considers the context in which nurses work and provides examples of what can be done at organisational, directorate and team levels to ensure patient safety.

Improving patient safety and incident reporting.

Patient safety is currently an international priority in health care, as it is widely accepted that the quality of healthcare provision, in terms of reducing errors and other forms of unnecessary patient harm, needs to be improved significantly. This article describes the work and position of the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) in NHS-funded care. It outlines the contribution made by two nurses who, as clinical specialty advisers (CSAs) in the organisation, are charged with helping to ensure that nursing issues are considered as an integral part of developing solutions to patient safety issues.

Sharing digital teaching resources: breaking down barriers by addressing the concerns of faculty members.

Purpose: Regional and institutional databases have been created to improve access to educational resources and to avert unnecessary duplication. The growth and success of these databases depend upon the willingness of faculty members to contribute their materials. This qualitative study seeks to identify the barriers that block the free exchange of educational multimedia and the incentives that could be created to overcome educators' concerns.

Introducing HEAL: the Health Education Assets Library.

Digital multimedia, such as images and videos, are playing an increasingly important role in health sciences education. Educators, however, often do not have the time or resources to create high-quality materials. The authors describe the development of a new Health Education Assets Library (HEAL), a freely accessible, national library of high-quality digital multimedia to support all levels of health sciences education.

Webcasting videoconferences over IP: a synchronous communication experiment.

A multipoint videoconference was webcast live to an audience who could communicate with conference panelists and each other via chat. The videoconference, webcast, and chat were done entirely over the Internet. Seven panelists at four conference sites that had Internet2 connectivity and were located in different time zones within the continental United States discussed the topic of "Evaluating Health Professions Education and Information Resources on the Web.