Wait Times in Canadian Emergency Departments: An Incessant Dilemma
Individuals often erroneously equate a nation’s economic stability with the quality of its healthcare. However, this is not always true, and definitely not in the case of Canada. The average waiting time for patients in Canadian EDs ranges from three to four hours. More preposterously, this “average” accounts for only a minority of the population. When asked up front, most patients claimed that they’d had to wait for at least five hours before consulting a physician.
Surveillance Beyond the ICU
While much of the focus has been on the ICU and the many monitoring and therapeutic patient care devices used to maintain and manage patients’ airway, breathing, and circulation (ABC), there is also a growing need outside of these high-acuity settings for monitoring patients. What the general public—and even hospital leadership—might not be aware of is that outside of critical care, there is a patient safety concern that could be growing, in part, due to clinical staffing pressures associated with COVID-19.
Patient Service: Standards and Practices for Excellence in the COVID-19 Era
One thing that has not changed is providers’ desire to provide excellent patient care and service, and patients’ need to feel comfortable and well cared-for in the ambulatory environment. It is also still true that patients often judge the overall quality of their care based on the service experience at the hospital or office, and that perception is based on a comparison between their pre-visit expectations and their actual experience during the visit.
Q&A: How to Get FEMA Emergency Funding During the COVID Crisis
A broad range of federal programs were allocated funding through the $150 billion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed by Congress. But getting that money, either through FEMA or other agencies, has caused some confusion for governments, institutions, organizations, and individuals in search of COVID-19–related aid.
Keeping Patients Safe: How Has the Patient Safety Movement Evolved in the U.S.?
Patient safety culture is a cornerstone of healthcare quality. Fostering patient safety culture requires an understanding of an organization’s values, beliefs, and norms. Furthermore, it requires an understanding of the appropriate attitudes and behaviors related to patient safety.
Optimizing Patient Safety Through System Strategies and Patient Engagement
Patient engagement is important to promote safety in healthcare, and patient-centered decision-making is a central means to facilitate this engagement. There are several clinical trials suggesting that engaged patients have a significant mortality reduction.
Long Time Coming
It may be a long time coming, but what’s very much needed is a mechanism for identifying, by individual facility, specific systemic sources of patient stress. We might call this a Systemic-Stress EMM (SSEMM) audit. “EMM” denotes eradication, minimization, and mitigation. Depending on a source and its context, one of these three tactics will be more feasible than the other two.
Q&A: PPE Success During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Where hospitals were once coached by safety professionals to ensure they had enough PPE stockpiled, they are now begging the U.S. government to share PPE from the stockpile. Once upon a time, workers were told to use their surgical masks only once. Today, those masks get put into a bag at the end of a shift and used the next day—and maybe the day after that.
Lack of Evidence-Based Guidelines for COVID-19 in Pregnancy May Present a Risk of Compromised Care
Since the emergence of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in December 2019, public health authorities and professional societies have been scrambling to develop management guidelines for clinicians to utilize. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention distributed their first guidance in late January and have made continual revisions to date, with many professional societies following suit.
Q&A: Many Hospitals Still Don’t Have Drug Diversion Programs
The Porter Research survey commissioned by Invistics found that nine out of 10 surveyed believe their facility’s drug diversion program is the same or even better than other organizations, and two out of three are confident or very confident that their drug diversion program successfully identifies employees who divert drugs. But there is definitely a disconnect, because 70% of participants said they believe most diversion incidents in the U.S. go undetected.