On January 15, 2001, Justin Micalizzi, a healthy 11-year-old boy, was taken into surgery to incise and drain a swollen ankle. He was dead by 7:55 a.m. the next day, leaving behind two grieving and bewildered parents who desperately wanted to know why their son had died.

Various reports indicate that the use of barcodes for medication and patient tracking has made a minimal penetration in the critical care environment.

We appreciate this opportunity to tell you about an outstanding new resource for training healthcare providers in better teamwork practices, developed jointly by the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) — TeamSTEPPS, which stands for Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety.

Several years ago while attending an executive retreat for senior hospital leadership from around the United States, my conversation with a CEO from a large southeast academic institution turned to medical errors.

Despite a national push toward the use of health information technology and increasing use of the Internet for medical information, not much is known about the knowledge and use of these applications by high school students (Thoenes, et al., 2006).

MRI suites hold unique dangers for patients and staff. Today’s high-strength clinical MRI scanners are up to 60,000 times the strength of the Earth’s own ambient magnetic field.

I was amused by a headline in a recent edition of a Chicago newspaper that read, “City Council considers ban on frying food in trans fat oils…” Can you imagine? Could this be another government regulation stating the obvious and trying to protect us from what we already know?

Call it election year politics or just sheer luck, but both houses of the United States Congress passed healthcare information technology (HIT) bills in less than a year.

Cardiac arrest is a leading cause of death in the United States. The American Heart Association estimates that this year 250,000 Americans will die of sudden cardiac arrest before reaching a hospital. That’s 680 deaths each day; one death every 2 minutes.

Jeff Hardy interviewed Valli Washburn, RN, director of emergency and intensive care services at Glendale Memorial Hospital and Health Center, a 334-bed facility in Glendale, California. Washburn led the planning process for designing what is now called the “Clinical Nursing Worktable” installed in the intensive care unit at Glendale Memorial Hospital.