The National Patient Safety Goals (NPSGs) are a set of seven evidence-based priorities that hospitals must follow to prevent common, preventable harm. Published by The Joint Commission, the organization that accredits most U.S. hospitals, these goals have been updated annually since 2003 and carry real weight: hospitals that fail to meet them can lose their accreditation. Here are the seven goals currently in effect for 2025, what each one means in practice, and a significant change coming in 2026.
The 7 Goals at a Glance
The Joint Commission organizes each goal under a numbered code, but the core list is straightforward:
- Goal 1: Identify patients correctly
- Goal 2: Improve staff communication
- Goal 3: Use medicines safely
- Goal 6: Use alarms safely
- Goal 7: Prevent infection
- Goal 15: Identify patient safety risks
- Goal 16: Improve health care equity
You’ll notice the numbering skips around. That’s because earlier goals (like Goal 4 and Goal 5) were retired or folded into other standards over the years, but the original numbering was kept to avoid confusion.
Goal 1: Identify Patients Correctly
Mix-ups in patient identity are one of the most dangerous and preventable errors in health care. This goal requires staff to use at least two patient identifiers before administering medications, drawing blood, collecting specimens, or performing any treatment or procedure. Acceptable identifiers include the patient’s name, a medical record number, a date of birth, or a phone number.
One thing that is explicitly not allowed: using a patient’s room number or physical location as an identifier. Room assignments change, patients move, and relying on location has led to the exact kind of mix-ups this goal exists to prevent. If you’ve ever noticed a nurse asking your name and date of birth multiple times during a single hospital stay, this goal is why.
Goal 2: Improve Staff Communication
This goal focuses on one specific communication problem: making sure critical test results and diagnostic findings reach the right provider quickly. A dangerous lab value or an unexpected finding on an imaging scan means nothing if the information sits in a system and nobody acts on it. Hospitals must have defined processes for reporting critical results to the responsible licensed caregiver in a timely way, so that treatment decisions can happen without delay.
Goal 3: Use Medicines Safely
Medication errors are among the most common types of harm in hospitals, and this goal addresses them from multiple angles. It covers three sub-requirements: safely managing high-risk medications (like blood thinners and concentrated electrolytes), properly labeling all medications and containers used during procedures, and reducing harm from anticoagulant therapy specifically, since blood-thinning drugs carry an outsized risk when dosed incorrectly.
In practical terms, this means hospitals must have protocols for double-checking certain drug categories, clearly labeling syringes even in the operating room, and monitoring patients on blood thinners with regular lab work and dose adjustments. For patients, this goal is the reason a nurse will often scan both your wristband and the medication barcode before handing you a pill.
Goal 6: Use Alarms Safely
Modern hospital rooms are filled with monitors, each capable of sounding alarms for heart rate, oxygen levels, blood pressure, and more. The problem is not too few alarms but too many. When monitors trigger hundreds of alerts per patient per day, most of them clinically insignificant, staff can become desensitized. This phenomenon, known as alarm fatigue, has contributed to patient deaths when a genuinely critical alarm went unnoticed.
This goal requires hospitals to establish policies for managing clinical alarms: identifying which alarms are most important, adjusting default settings to reduce unnecessary noise, and ensuring that when an alarm does sound, someone responds appropriately. Hospitals typically accomplish this by customizing alarm parameters to each patient’s baseline, turning off redundant alerts, and establishing clear accountability for who responds to which alarm type.
Goal 7: Prevent Infection
Healthcare-associated infections remain a leading cause of preventable illness and death in hospitals. This goal centers on hand hygiene compliance, following CDC or World Health Organization guidelines for when and how staff should clean their hands. It also extends to evidence-based practices for preventing specific infection types, including catheter-associated urinary tract infections, central line bloodstream infections, and surgical site infections.
For patients, this goal translates to visible hand-sanitizer stations in every hallway, staff washing or sanitizing hands before and after contact with you, and specific care bundles for any invasive device like a urinary catheter or IV line. You are well within your rights to ask a healthcare worker if they’ve washed their hands before touching you.
Goal 15: Identify Patient Safety Risks
This goal requires hospitals to screen patients for suicide risk. It applies broadly, not just to psychiatric units, because suicidal ideation can surface in any part of the hospital, from the emergency department to a medical floor. Hospitals must use a validated screening tool, take immediate action when risk is identified, and ensure the environment is safe for at-risk patients by addressing things like anchor points and access to sharps.
This is the newest “numbered” safety goal in the original NPSG framework and reflects growing recognition that behavioral health emergencies happen throughout the hospital, not only in dedicated mental health settings.
Goal 16: Improve Health Care Equity
Added in recent years, this goal requires hospitals to actively work toward reducing health care disparities. It asks organizations to identify patient populations that experience disparities in outcomes, collect demographic data that can reveal gaps, and take measurable action to close them. This might mean improving interpreter services, analyzing complication rates by race or language, or redesigning discharge processes for patients with limited health literacy.
Unlike the other goals, which target specific clinical actions, Goal 16 is structural. It asks hospitals to examine whether their systems deliver equally safe care to all patients, and to prove it with data.
The Universal Protocol: A Related Requirement
Though not one of the seven numbered goals, the Universal Protocol is a closely related Joint Commission requirement worth knowing about. Enacted in 2004, it exists to prevent wrong-site, wrong-procedure, and wrong-person surgery through three steps: a pre-procedure verification process, marking the surgical site, and performing a “time out” immediately before the first incision. During the time out, the entire surgical team pauses to confirm the patient’s identity, the procedure being performed, and the correct body site. Research has shown that this practice improves teamwork and reduces the overall risk of wrong-site surgery.
A Major Change Coming in 2026
Effective January 1, 2026, The Joint Commission will replace the National Patient Safety Goals with a new framework called National Performance Goals (NPGs). This new chapter reorganizes requirements into measurable topics with clearly defined goals, going beyond the safety-specific focus of the NPSGs. The shift reflects an evolution in how The Joint Commission structures its accreditation standards, broadening the lens from patient safety alone to overall performance. Hospitals and healthcare professionals preparing for accreditation surveys in 2026 will need to familiarize themselves with the new NPG structure.