Discharge Disaster? Shoeless Patient Abandoned Out In The Cold and Dark
While there are a lot of what-ifs about the incident, “we technically don’t know what happened during the encounter,” notes Frank Ruelas, MBA, a patient safety professional and HIPAA consultant who founded HIPAA College in Arizona. “However, there is enough information for us to consider asking questions on how we may have managed this patient if she had presented at our respective ED within our respective hospitals.”
Scanning for Maternal Disease
If left undiagnosed or untreated, infectious diseases can be extremely dangerous and even life-threatening, so it is critical that testing and treatment for both the woman and baby is completed according to clinical practice guidelines.
Nurse Calls Cops After New Mom Seeks Help For Depression. Right Call?
When patients reference violent thoughts, it forces doctors to think about things in a different way.
Protecting your Patients: Violence and Active Shooters
Experts on healthcare safety say nonverbal body language known as “behaviors of concern” can precede actual violence, and if caught early, de-escalation tactics can be used to intervene and keep the situation from becoming violent.
A Push To Get Older Adults In Shape For Surgery
Researchers reported that older adults who went through the POSH program before major abdominal operations spent less time in the hospital (four days versus six days for a control group), were less likely to return to the hospital in the next 30 days, and were more likely to return home without the need for home health care. They also had slightly fewer complications.
Rights and Restraints: The Need For Good Restraint and Seclusion Policies
The misuse of restraints has led to death by asphyxiation, as well as complications such as nerve injuries, incontinence, pneumonia, and pressure ulcers. But despite the dangers, CMS says it’s documented over 1,400 related deficiencies between 2011 and 2015.
Judge Orders New Olympus Trial Over Superbug Death
At the initial Bigler trial last year, jurors rejected claims that the design of the company’s top-selling gastrointestinal scope hampered cleaning and declined to award punitive damages to the family. Instead, the jury ordered Olympus to pay the Seattle hospital involved $6.6 million in damages. In turn, the hospital, Virginia Mason Medical Center, had to pay the family $1 million.
The Tale of The Flying Gurney, and Other Events That Should Never Happen, But Still Do
While hospitals do their best to limit the number of so-called “never events” that happen to their patients, recent events show that there is still work to be done.
In patient safety circles, “never events” are mistakes that should simply never happen—seemingly commonsense mistakes such as a surgeon accidentally leaving a scalpel inside a patient, a newborn infant given to the wrong parents, or any death of a patient due to the gross negligence of a caregiver.
Study: Community-Based Organizations Do Not Impact Patient Hospitalization
Connecting patients with community-based organization often has little impact on the frequency with which a patient is seen in the emergency department (ED) or hospitalized.
An Opioid Remedy That Works: Treat Pain And Addiction At The Same Time
In 2016, a record 912 people died from an overdose in Colorado, according to data recently released by the state health department. Of those, 300 people died from an opioid overdose. Opioid use often leads to an addiction to heroin, which claimed another 228 lives last year in the state. Those two causes together now rival the number of deaths from car accidents in the state.