News

ANA Issues Standards for Safe Patient Handling as Foundation for National Drive to Improve Worker Safety

The American Nurses Association (ANA) has published new national standards for safe patient handling and mobility that are designed to infuse a stronger culture of safety in healthcare work environments and provide a universal foundation for policies, practices, regulations, and legislation to protect patients and healthcare workers from injury.

Patient- and Family-Centered Care

Partnering with Patients and Families from the Bedside to the Boardroom

By Libby Hoy and Mia Arias

Imagine a setting where patients and families feel confident and comfortable asking questions, providing valuable historical information, and discussing their health priorities in open dialogue with their providers. How many adverse medical events could be avoided? How many duplicated tests could be eliminated?

Analytics

Predictive Analytics Drives Patient Engagement and Improves Care

Despite the best efforts of clinicians around the country, healthcare delivery is still largely a cottage industry. Just like the old family-run corner store, or the artist down the street who makes jewelry to sell at local craft fairs, isolated teams of wonderfully talented and committed individuals have for many years done the best they can to provide rescue care.

Using Six Sigma to Improve Patient Safety in the Perioperative Process

By Brian J. Galli, MS, PE; Nancy Riebling, MS, PMP, MT(ASCP); Corazon Paraso, RN, MSN, NE-BC; Gina Lehmann, RN, CNOR; Maria Yule, CNOR

In this project, the Six Sigma methodology was utilized to improve patient safety and compliance to the Time Out protocol and certain Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP) measures.  The project took place in the perioperative service at Huntington Hospital, in Huntington, New York. Six Sigma is an improvement science that utilizes a structured approach known as DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) and a series of improvement tools in order to identify sources of variation and to develop improvement strategies that would lead to the reduction of opportunities for defects and variation in a process or system.

Health IT & Quality

The Health Supply Chain

By Barry P. Chaiken, MD, FHIMSS

The shift to value-based reimbursement from volume-based reimbursement puts great pressure on organizations to obtain a detailed understanding of how they deliver care and what resources they use. Without a deep understanding of these issues, providers are unable to effectively manage care delivery and survive an environment of declining reimbursement.

ISMP

Patient-Controlled Analgesia

Fatal PCA adverse events continue to happen… Better patient monitoring is essential to prevent harm.

By The Institute for Safe Medication Practices

With this issue, Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare (PSQH) reaches its fifth anniversary, which prompts me to take a moment and think about how much the world has changed and stayed the same in the past five years. When we published the first issue, in July 2004, the patient safety community was discussing how much progress—if any—had been made since the IOM published To Err Is Human five years earlier, and now we are assessing progress made over the past 10 years.

Community Hospital Gives Its Discharge Process a BOOST

By Pam Cronrath, RN, MN; and Marisa Gillaspie Aziz, RN, MSN, ACNS-BC

The nation’s healthcare system recognizes the need to improve the coordination of care transitions (hand-overs) between healthcare providers (Bisognanao & Boutwell, 2009; California HealthCare Foundation, 2008). Emerging entities such as transition clinics, transitional nurses, medical homes, and accountable care organizations are examples of the healthcare system striving to improve care coordination.

From Blame to Fair and Just Culture:
A Hospital in the Middle East Shifts Its Paradigm

By Krishnan Sankaranarayanan MS, MBA, CPHQ; Steven A. Matarelli PhD, RN; Hasrat Parkar, MBBS, MRCGP; and Mamoon Abu Haltem MS, RN

The concept of a “culture of safety” emerged from high reliability organizations (HROs) such as in the aviation and nuclear power industries. The objective of HROs is to consistently minimize adverse events despite carrying out inherently intricate and hazardous work. These organizations maintain a commitment to safety at all levels, from frontline providers to managers and executives. Improving the culture of safety within healthcare is long overdue and is now becoming essential to preventing and reducing errors, thereby improving overall healthcare quality (AHRQ, n.d.).

Editor’s Notebook

Lessons Learned—A Book Review as a Small Test of Change

By Susan Carr

Writing book reviews on a regular basis is a goal I have failed to achieve for years. Wanting to write nothing but comprehensive, stimulating reviews, I too often don’t write them at all—a classic case of letting perfect be the enemy of the good.