Patient Safety Awareness takes place March 9-15, 2025: Advancing Healthcare Safety Through Action
Patient Safety Awareness Week (PSAW) takes place from March 9-15, 2025, serving as a national education campaign to promote patient safety practices. Organized by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), this annual event fosters important discussions at local and global levels, inspiring action to improve healthcare safety for both patients and the workforce.
What’s new for PSAW 2025? The power of “A.”
This year’s theme emphasizes the power of “A”: Awareness, Assessment, and Action—three critical steps to ensuring safer healthcare systems.
- Awareness: Raise awareness for yourself, your organization, and the communities served on what matters for constancy of purpose and transformation of safety by reviewing Safer Together: A National Action Plan to Advance Patient Safety, the CMS Patient Safety Structural Measure (PSSM), and the aims of the HHS National Action Alliance for Patient and Workforce Safety (NAA). Regardless of whether your organization is subject to the PSSM, each of these initiatives offers essential guidance to realize and sustain safety.
- Assessment: Convene a team, inclusive of patient and family representation, to assess your organization’s current strengths and opportunities for improvement using the Safer Together Organizational Self-Assessment Tool. If applicable, this assessment will help gauge your organization’s performance compared to the PSSM.
- Action: Informed by your self-assessment, take action to create and enact improvement plans, develop measurement and evaluation strategies, and identify accountability owners and processes to steward safety progress.
The Role of AccuVax and AccuShelf in Patient Safety
For TruMed Systems, PSAW is a reminder that even small improvements in medication management can significantly impact patient safety. One of the most common risks in vaccine administration is human error—including incorrect dosing, expired vaccines, or improper storage—all of which can compromise patient safety and regulatory compliance.
At TruMed, we turn awareness into action by equipping healthcare providers with AccuVax and AccuShelf, advanced storage and management systems designed to eliminate common medication errors, reduce waste, and improve workflow efficiency.
How AccuVax by TruMed Increases Patient Safety
At TruMed we understand that patient safety is directly impacted by proper vaccine storage & handling. That’s we have Patient Safety checks built into our products.
A recent analysis from of the ISMP National Vaccine Errors Reporting Program showed that the most frequent types of vaccine events, other than those related to the COVID-19 vaccines, were:
The majority of these errors occur in outpatient settings such as medical clinics (49%), doctors’ offices (20%), public health immunization clinics (11%), and community pharmacies (9%), largely due to the absence of widespread barcode scanning in outpatient environments. Notably, only 3% of errors happen in inpatient hospital settings.
With AccuVax, most of these errors are preventable. Our system automates temperature control, eliminates the risk of administering expired vaccines, and ensures that patients never receive a wrong or duplicate vaccine. The only areas AccuVax does not address are wrong route (1%) and other (10%).
Commitment to Patient Safety Beyond PSAW
PSAW 2025 calls on the healthcare community to align on safety and take meaningful action. By leveraging the power of Awareness, Assessment, and Action, we can shift patient safety from an aspiration to a realization.
At TruMed Systems, our focus on patient safety extends beyond PSAW. Every day, we work to enhance healthcare safety through automation and innovation, ensuring that medication management is precise, compliant, and error-free.
Join us in promoting safer healthcare by learning more about AccuVax and AccuShelf, and how they can help protect patients from preventable medication errors.
