Patient safety and patient satisfaction should go hand-in-hand. Hospitals ought to be able to provide care that is safe and meets or exceeds patient expectations for service quality.

If true to their Hippocratic Oath, healthcare providers are deeply committed to ensuring that their actions are nothing less than helpful and curative.

Patient identification is the cornerstone of patient safety. In fact, virtually all patient safety initiatives call for patient identification as a critical step in a larger workflow, such as verifying the “five rights” of medication administration or matching the correct blood product with the right patient prior to a transfusion.

It has been almost 3 years since President Bush signed the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005. However, we are quickly learning that law without federal regulation and funding is all bark and no bite.

That quote is just one of the many challenging facts presented in Scott McLeod’s 2006 presentation Shift Happens. McLeod, a teacher at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado, outside of Denver, prepared a PowerPoint presentation for a regular faculty meeting.

Like enthusiastic schoolchildren bubbling with friendly competition for attention, a room full of CEOs and other executives vied for time on the microphone to share their problems, success stories, and questions about improving the safety and quality of care delivered in their institutions.

Patients in hospitals have a right to expect that any risks associated with their care are avoided. When it comes to catheter-related bloodstream infections (CRBSIs), those expectations are not being met. Many in the infection control community believe that CRBSIs are preventable.

The U.S. healthcare system is arguably designed to care for sick people. Some have effectively argued that is should be relabeled a “sick care” system.

While healthcare information technology certainly isn’t new, today medical centers are deploying more sophisticated systems that directly impact the quality of patient care, patient satisfaction, and clinical processes more than ever before.

Blogs. They provide commentary or news on a particular subject, can serve as a personal online diary and allow readers to leave comments in an interactive format. So what do blogs have to do with healthcare and patient safety?