ArticleBMC health services research2025
Diagnostic safety in the policy landscape - a comparative policy document analysis of Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand vs US health care and research policy.
Article in BMC health services research, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundDiagnostic safety, a subset of patient safety, ensures safe, high-quality care in the diagnostic process e.g. through reporting and evaluating near-misses and errors. It involves healthcare policy (e.g. incident reporting guidelines) and research policy (e.g. research funding). To date, policy attention to diagnostic safety has been limited.
methodsAcross United States (US) versus Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand (AUS/AoNZ) policy contexts, we systematically identified relevant policy documents from national health quality organisations and Emergency Medicine (EM) specialist colleges and compared the development and integration of diagnostic safety into policy. We adopted a directed policy document analytical approach (READ (Ready materials, Extract data, Analyse data, Distil findings) to develop comparative frameworks for diagnostic safety policy and embedded a case study on Emergency Medicine guidelines.
resultsWe identified 237 publicly available, written policy documents (AUS/AoNZ: n = 151; US: n = 86) and 36 EM guidelines AUS/AoNZ: n = 16; US: n = 20) from national US and AUS/AoNZ health quality organisations and EM specialist colleges. The majority of policy documents (55%) were published between 2019 and 2023. US policy documents had a greater dedicated diagnostic safety focus (n = 58, 67%) compared to a generic patient safety focus (n = 28; 33%) and had higher emphasis on research compared to diseases. AUS/AoNZ documents focused more on generic patient safety (n = 102, 68%) than diagnostic safety (n = 49, 32%) and concentrated more on diseases than research. The majority of EM guidelines (AUS/AoNZ: 81%, US: 75%) contained diagnostic safety comments, but overall 20% focused on treatment rather than diagnosis. US EM guidelines showed greater legal considerations.
conclusionsAwareness of diagnostic safety as reflected in healthcare and research policy is growing. Identifying country-specific differences can inform future strategic policy development and target areas that have received limited attention.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.