The American Society for Healthcare Risk Management (ASHRM) hosts its annual campaign to raise awareness about the critical role risk management and patient safety professionals play in helping to eliminate preventable serious safety events. Throughout HRM Week, June 18-22, ASHRM is offering solutions that risk managers and patient safety experts can employ to help prevent some of the most common serious safety events, many of which are aligned with the Hospital Engagement Network (HEN) Initiative.

By Tim Vanderveen, PharmD, MS

In April, Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare published an article summarizing a recent webinar presented through ourCenter for Safety and Clinical Excellence. The article is titled “Smart Pump Workarounds – What’s the Legal Risk?”, and it focuses on personal accountability on the part of caregivers in safely operating Smart IV pumps.

Caregiver accountability has been a hot topic in recent months. As it relates to IV medication safety, it’s a critical issue and worth paying attention to. It’s been shown that clinicians often implement process workarounds, including not utilizing the drug library, overriding soft dose and concentration alerts, reprogramming infusions as rate in ml/hr following hard limits, and occasionally removing IV tubing from pumps and delivering medication boluses by gravity to avoid a high dose alert.

Sandy, Utah—About one in two nurses experience blood exposure, other than from a needlestick, on their skin or in their eyes, nose or mouth at least once a month when inserting a peripheral intravenous (IV) catheter, according to a new study by the International Healthcare Worker Safety Center at the University of Virginia.[1] Exposure to blood carries the risk of infection from pathogens such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis B (HBV), hepatitis C (HCV) and MRSA.

Traverse City, Michigan—Michigan’s largest surgery center, Northwest Michigan Surgery Center recently selected the Versus Advantages™ Real-time Locating System (RTLS) to help improve the patient care experience. Key focus areas include relaying patient status information to families in the waiting room and automated process flow management for clinical staff.

Boston, Massachusetts, June 2, 2011 – Best Doctors, the global company dedicated to helping people and their treating doctors get the right diagnosis and right treatment, announced it is tackling a record number of cancer cases this year, including numerous cases that were initially misdiagnosed.

Washington, D.C., March 30, 2011—The AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) announced a new multi-year effort, Best Practices for Better Care, that harnesses the unique missions of academic medicine—medical education, patient care, and research—and applies them to the challenges of improving quality and safety in health care.