March is National Nutrition Month, an annual nutrition education and information campaign spearheaded by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that highlights how important it is to make informed food choices and develop health eating and exercise habits.

In 2013 – the commemoration’s 40th anniversary – the month’s theme is “Eat Right, Your Way, Every Day,” which aims to encourage “personalized healthy eating styles and recognizes that food preferences, lifestyle, cultural and ethnic traditions and health concerns all impact individual food choices.”

Nutrition deficiency contributes to many serious health conditions such as heart disease, stroke, hypertension, diabetes and certain cancers....

In 2008, the National Quality Forum declared patient and family engagement to be one of six national priorities to eradicate disparities, reduce harm, and remove waste from the U.S. health system. The study discovered that patient-centered care demonstrated a positive impact on patient satisfaction, length of stay, and cost per case.

But what does patient and family engagement really mean? Essentially, it comes down to the basics of improving communication between patients and providers at the bedside or institutionally through committees focused on systemic changes in patient care....

In recognition of Patient Safety Awareness Week (March 3-9), the NAPH Safety Network will feature posts from staff at member hospitals. The NAPH Safety Network is a Partnership for Patients hospital engagement network that aims to reduce nine preventable hospital-acquired conditions by 40 percent and 30-day readmissions by 20 percent by 2013.

These Latin words, translated as “first, do no harm,” are easy to embrace. We do this difficult work because we are answering a calling or serving a mission, and that’s some of the reason we’re embarrassed by medical error.

The problem is not small. Wrong patient, site or procedure errors occur five to 10 times per day, and 37 percent of hospitalized patients experience an adverse event....

In recognition of Patient Safety Awareness Week (March 3-9), the NAPH Safety Network will feature posts from staff at member hospitals. The NAPH Safety Network is a Partnership for Patients hospital engagement network that aims to reduce nine preventable hospital-acquired conditions by 40 percent and 30-day readmissions by 20 percent by 2013.

San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center has joined the NAPH Safety Network (NSN) to reduce patient falls with injuries by 40 percent by the end of December 2013. This ambitious goal has been wholeheartedly embraced by patient safety, quality and executive leaders....

In recognition of Patient Safety Awareness Week (March 3-9), the NAPH Safety Network will feature posts from staff at member hospitals. The NAPH Safety Network is a Partnership for Patients hospital engagement network that aims to reduce nine preventable hospital-acquired conditions by 40 percent and 30-day readmissions by 20 percent by 2013.

San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center has been working with the NAPH Safety Network (NSN) since August 2012 to reduce hospital-acquired pressure ulcers (HAPUs) and falls with harm....

This week is Patient Safety Awareness Week (March 3-9, 2013), an annual campaign led by the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) to recognize efforts to improve patient safety and foster collaboration among health care organizations around the issue.

According to NPSF, this year's theme, "Patient Safety 7/365," aims to remind "health care professionals and health consumers that providing safe patient care requires constant dedication and effort, 365 days a year. The 7 days of the campaign also serve as time to recognize the focused work and efforts to improve health care safety worldwide."

NAPH members across the country have launched initiatives to improve patient safety....

Last month, I attended a Health Affairs briefing that announced their February issue, which focused on patient and family engagement (PFE). Throughout the presentation, speakers extolled the potential benefits of effective patient and family engagement programs – one speaker cited a Forbes article calling PFE the “blockbuster drug” of the century.

My “eureka moment” came when a panelist commented that preventable harm occurs when clinicians impose care that is inconsistent with the patient's values and wishes. Patient and family engagement advocates point to "shared decision making," a term for developing mutually agreed-upon care plans between clinicians and patients, as a principal element of any PFE initiative....

This blog is part of a month-long series from NAPH members addressing the relationship between gun violence and health care. Look for more posts this month covering issues from California to New York.

Back in the early 1990s, following an incident with a young trauma victim who was having a particularly tough time, the medical social worker at Highland Hospital’s trauma department proactively engaged YouthALIVE!, a local nonprofit focused on youth empowerment and leadership skills training. Together, we developed a new program called Caught in the Crossfire, which pairs “interventionists” with victims for a period of 6 months to 1 year, from bedside to job search. These specialists serve as long-term advocates for the victims and their families, offering hope and healing as they navigate the physical, emotional, logistical and spiritual challenges of recovery.

In 1999, former U.S....

This blog is part of a month-long series from NAPH members addressing the relationship between gun violence and health care. Look for more posts this month covering issues from California to New York.

Pediatricians and parents know that children are “unsafe at any speed.” Kids are endlessly curious and quickly become very adept at getting anything they are not physically prevented from reaching. They explore their world without understanding danger and, in one unsupervised instant, can drown or shoot someone or get run over. School-aged children learn from everything they see, hear and experience, modeled by us and in the media. They want to act like their avatars and often do not understand that pain is real or that death is permanent....

This blog is part of a month-long series from NAPH members addressing the relationship between gun violence and health care. Look for more posts this month covering issues from California to New York.

As a pediatrician, parents look to me to help them raise their children to be as healthy and happy as possible and prevent them from getting ill or hurt. The practice of medicine has changed a great deal in my lifetime. I no longer have to worry so much about the pathogens of the past -- deadly infectious diseases, such as meningitis and pneumonia -- because medical science has developed effective vaccines to prevent many of these illnesses and medications to treat them if they occur. Every day, scientists come up with new approaches, medicines and surgical procedures to treat cancers, heart disease, asthma and diabetes.

In my urban practice, though, almost every day I mourn tragedies my patients and their families have suffered....