Health Care Providers—Are WE a Quality Conundrum?

Every facility runs on policies and procedures. There are regulations and rules from outside to adhere with and internal policies that can expand on the requirements formulated by government and healthcare organizations. In the end, hospitals and other healthcare facilities are highly regulated and closely monitored.

Lessons From the Frontline: Compassionate Approaches to Preventing Patient Violence

By Ruth Ison, MDiv, STM

Healthcare workers, especially nurses on the front line of care, are at risk of being injured by patients who become violent because of their emotionally unstable or clinically agitated condition.

Improving Reliability with Root Cause Analysis

By Robert J. Latino

Root cause analysis (RCA) has an image problem. Because various regulatory agencies require RCA to be used under specific circumstances, usually following an adverse event, the tool is primarily viewed as reactive. When these “sentinel events” occur, we pull out the microscope—RCA—and take a deeper look. Used in this way, RCA is often viewed as a “money-taker” because it appears only to consume people’s time and resources when they already feel overloaded. Rarely do we ask for a return on investment (ROI) associated with an RCA.

Usability Testing of a U-500 Insulin Syringe: A Human Factors Approach

By Kelly Abraham, MPH; Bryanne Patail, BS, MLS, FACCE; and Danielle Wurth, MSE

Currently, 8.3% of the population, 25.8 million people, has diabetes in the United States. Not all of those 25.8 million have been diagnosed as diabetics. Among patients with diabetes, 90% to 95% are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, which often requires treatment with insulin (CDC, 2010).

Plan Ahead to Prevent Slips, Trips, and Falls

By Karen D. Hamel

Slips, trips, and falls on flat surfaces are the leading cause of workplace injury. And, in the healthcare industry, incident rates are 90% higher than in all other private industries combined, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ national census of nonfatal injuries.

Readmissions

Nursing Home Tackles Readmissions with In-house Primary Care

By Jennifer Wright, NHA, CPHQ

Across the country, healthcare providers are grappling with high rates of readmissions to hospitals within 30 days after discharge. Readmission to the hospital is stressful for patients and their families; costly; and, many times, avoidable.

Health IT & Quality

Evolving to Health 3.0

By Barry P. Chaiken, MD, FHIMSS

The dramatic shift to value-based reimbursement requires all providers to disrupt their care processes and workflows to ensure the delivery of high quality, safe care at a reasonable cost. For more than four decades these same providers thrived in an environment where providing more care easily generated higher prices and profits. In that former reimbursement model, a serious and dangerous moral hazard existed where the instinct to “do no harm” clashed with a similarly powerful driver to maximize income.

ISMP

FentaNYL Patch Fatalities Linked to ‘Bystander Apathy’

By The Institute for Safe Medication Practices

ISMP just learned about another child that died after gaining access to a transdermal fentaNYL patch. This time it was a 15-month-old boy who had been cuddling with his mother, sleeping on her chest as they both took a nap. The boy’s mother had been wearing a fentaNYL patch on her chest to treat pain associated with multiple sclerosis. When the mother awoke, she found her son unresponsive.

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.