Patient Safety Top of Mind for Medical Center and Design Team
Patient Safety Top of Mind for Medical Center and Design Team
Health providers, architects, and planners collaborated to put patient safety at the heart of the relocation and expansion of a leading Northern California trauma center/emergency department.
Q&A: Quality, Safety, and Medical Tourism
Q&A
Quality, Safety, and Medical Tourism
After a long career as a clinician and medical informatics leader at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Syed Tirmizi, MD, grabbed his passport and joined Quantros as vice president of international business development.
Look-Alike Drug Name Errors
Look-Alike Drug Name Errors
Is Enhanced Lettering the Answer?
Medication errors can result in significant morbidity and mortality and more costly care. Look-alike drug names that contribute to wrong drug errors are pervasive.
Improving IV Catheter Care
Improving IV Catheter Care to Safeguard against Deadly Infections
As recently reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC; 2010), the incidence of bloodstream infections associated with central venous catheters (central lines) has dropped 18%.
Health IT & Quality
Health IT & Quality
Is “Meaningful Use” Meaningful?
Now that the “meaningful use” rule has been finalized by the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC), many organizations turn their focus to a rapid deployment of electronic medical record (EMR) systems in an effort to achieve transformation of the United States healthcare system.
Patient Safety on the Fly
Patient Safety on the Fly Technology and Teamwork
Picture this: You are a nurse on an emergency transport helicopter en route to pick up a critical patient who is intubated at an outlying facility. Upon arrival, you learn the patient has adult respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), complicated by septic shock.
First, Protect the Patient from Harm
First, Protect the Patient from Harm
Applying Adult Learning Principles to Patient Safety
“First, do no harm.” Today, unlike in the time of Hippocrates, evidence of harm may not become immediately obvious during healthcare interventions. For example, a lapse in attention while inserting a central line may result in a blood stream infection that becomes apparent days later.
ED Decompression
ED Decompression
Combating Emergency Department Overcrowding with Creative and Flexible Planning
To set the scene, imagine that it is a cold and rainy Friday evening in early January, and you are a nurse in the emergency department (ED) of the local hospital. Patients, with various complaints and levels of acuity, are being cared for in the ED’s 30 treatment rooms.
Editor’s Notebook
Editor’s Notebook
No Easy Answers
Earlier this summer, I co-presented a webinar for the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) that focused on different sources of information currently available about patient safety, as well as opportunities for prospective authors.
Consumers as Partners
Consumers as Partners
Empowering Patients and Families to Call for Rapid Response
Engaging patients and families as integral members of the healthcare team is an essential step in delivering high-quality, safe patient care. One approach for empowering patients and families being implemented in hospitals nationwide is to invite them to activate rapid response teams (RRTs) if patients show signs of physical deterioration or something doesn’t appear “quite right” with the patient.