Improving Hospital Patient Safety: Six Basic Principles to Guide Our Pursuit
Most Americans encounter the healthcare system in their first seconds of life, as they emerge into the world at one of our birthing hospital units. For many, their last seconds are also spent as a patient in a hospital. Nationally, healthcare appears to be delivered at a 2%–4% error rate, with over 18 million adverse events occurring per year. Yet despite two decades of intensive quality improvement work at hospitals, little has changed for the better.
Battling alarm fatigue for improved patient care and safety
By: Jordan Rosenfeld Medical alarms are meant to alert medical staff when a patient’s condition requires immediate attention. Unfortunately, there are so many false alarms — they’re false as much as 72% to 99% percent of the time — that they lead to alarm fatigue in nurses and other healthcare professionals. One study found that … Continued
BD Launches Fully Sterile Surgical Skin Preparation
Skin antiseptic products are used to reduce bacterial burden on skin prior to performing invasive medical procedures, such as injections or surgical incisions. In this role, skin antiseptics, including alcohol, iodine, and chlorhexidine gluconate (CHG), are part of the frontline in infection control. [i],[ii],[iii],[iv],[v] As our understanding of factors leading to infection has evolved, so … Continued
Good Steps to Safety: Guidelines for Communication and Health Literacy
Partnership between professionals and patients to maintain communication and health literacy can improve healthcare safety. However, involving and committing patients to their health requires professionals to possess broad skills.
IHI Pushes Safety as a Primary Business Strategy
Hospital leaders must adopt safety and quality as primary business strategies, rather than regarding them as tertiary metrics that rank below finances and other stressors on the C suite’s list of top priorities, according to Derek Feeley, president and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
Safety Is a Top Priority for Hospitals, Yet Many Report Safety Gaps
The survey, conducted from July to August 2019, found that improving patient safety is among hospital leaders’ top three priorities over the next two years. Yet the survey also found that only 20% of hospital executives said their organization is a “safety innovator,” meaning it has the resources committed to provide state-of-the-art patient safety management.
Educating Consumers About Genetic Testing
A 2018 study published in Genetics in Medicine by clinical testing lab Ambry Genetics found these DTC genetic tests had a 40% false positive rate. In addition, 17% of variants in raw data from DTC tests were misinterpreted as high risk.
Predicting Flu Season Remains Difficult, but Get Ready for a Doozy
CDC statistics show that the 2018–2019 season broke records, logging in at 21 weeks long, from October 1, 2018 to May 4, 2019. Up to 42 million cases of the flu were reported, resulting in 20 million medical visits, 647,000 hospitalizations, and about 61,000 deaths.
Q&A: The Impact of To Err is Human at 20
Since the report’s initial claim that as many as 98,000 people die annually from medical errors, there have been major strides in changing healthcare organization’s systemic problem, workplace cultures, and improvement processes.
ECRI Institute, ISMP to Combine Efforts
The transaction, which is expected to close on January 2, will see ISMP become a subsidiary of ECRI Institute. Both are nonprofit organizations that promote patient safety by highlighting adverse effects, near misses, and unsafe conditions in various healthcare settings.