MRI Safety 10 Years Later

MRI Safety 10 Years Later

In the summer of 2001, the radiology world was shocked to learn of an accident at Westchester Medical Center in New York state in which 6-year-old Michael Colombini was killed while being prepared for an MRI exam. Sedated and positioned in the scanner, the child’s oxygen saturation levels began dropping quickly.

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NPSF Announces 2012 Patient Safety Awareness Week Campaign

Oct. 4, 2011—The National Patient Safety Foundation today announced its 2012 Patient Safety Awareness Week campaign, Be Aware for Safe Care. Patient Safety Awareness Week will take place March 4-10, 2012. This year’s theme highlights the need for everyone to understand the importance of patient safety and to recognize the range of efforts being made to improve health safety in the US and worldwide.

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Story Power

Editor’s Notebook

Story Power

The patient safety community generally understands the value of stories as a way to honor the experience of people who have been harmed by medical error, to humanize efforts to improve safety, and to inspire the will to change. I had an experience in August that demonstrated just how powerful and disarming these stories can be.

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Working Together for Patients with Limited Proficiency in English

Medical Interpretation

Working Together for Patients with Limited Proficiency in English

Effective communication between the patient and the medical provider plays a vital role in the delivery of high-quality medical care. But what if that patient is a non-English speaker? Not only do healthcare facilities have a duty to provide language assistance services to limited-English proficient (LEP) patients to ensure quality medical care, but currently there are requirements for equal language access that recipients of federal funding must adhere to.

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Daily Check-In for Safety: From Best Practice to Common Practice

Daily Check-In for Safety: From Best Practice to Common Practice

In the nuclear power industry, knowing the status of plant operations and early identification of potential problems is safety critical. At nuclear generating stations across the country, like the Black Fox plant (a pseudonym), each day begins with a plan-of-the-day meeting of plant leaders.

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Automated Pre-op Instructions in a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Automated Pre-op Instructions in a Culture of Continuous Improvement

The benefits of providing patients with pre-operative instructions tailored specifically to their unique procedures, health status, and medications are well established. Patient safety perhaps tops this list. Healthcare providers have long recognized that offering clear, easily understandable instructions that cover requirements including fasting, discontinuing anticoagulants or blood pressure regulators, avoiding tobacco and alcohol, and more can enhance patient safety by reducing the chances of potentially life-threatening perioperative complications (Tea, 2010).

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The Silent Treatment: Why Safety Tools and Checklists Aren’t Enough

The Silent Treatment: Why Safety Tools and Checklists Aren’t Enough

Poor communication is deadly, especially in critical care settings (Wachter, 2010; The Joint Commission, 2010). When communication breaks down in intensive care units (ICU) and operating rooms, the result is catastrophic harm (Alvarez, 2006; Gandhi, 2005) and even death (Consumers Union, 2009; Institute of Medicine, 2000).

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Patient Safety Summit in Emergency Care

Patient Safety Summit in Emergency Care

Emergency care and patient safety thought-leaders from across North America convened in Las Vegas in May 2011 to spend two days together to address the patient safety challenges and opportunities throughout the continuum of emergency care. The event was hosted by the Emergency Medicine Patient Safety Foundation (EMPSF), a national not-for-profit organization based in California whose mission is to improve patient safety in the practice of emergency medicine through education, research, collaboration, and training.

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