The Risk of Workarounds
In April, Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare published an article summarizing a recent webinar presented through ourCenter for Safety and Clinical Excellence. The article is titled “Smart Pump Workarounds – What’s the Legal Risk?”, and it focuses on personal accountability on the part of caregivers in safely operating Smart IV pumps.
Caregiver accountability has been a hot topic in recent months. As it relates to IV medication safety, it’s a critical issue and worth paying attention to. It’s been shown that clinicians often implement process workarounds, including not utilizing the drug library, overriding soft dose and concentration alerts, reprogramming infusions as rate in ml/hr following hard limits, and occasionally removing IV tubing from pumps and delivering medication boluses by gravity to avoid a high dose alert.
Another Way to Do Harm
In PSQH, we usually focus on preventing patient harm that results from errors—mediation overdoses, wrong-site surgery, MRI accidents, failure to rescue, etc.—that trace back to systemic problems in healthcare institutions. Those problems include poor communication, environments full of distraction and stress, inadequate training, power hierarchies, to name a few.
Enlivening Biophilia: Sky Factory Promotes Healing for Cancer Patients
The Sky Factory, a fine art and technology company, will exhibit at ESTRO 31 in Barcelona, May 9 – 13.
Healthcare Providers to Increase Efficiency with InSites Connect
Intelligent InSites, Inc., the leading provider of enterprise real-time location systems (RTLS) software helping hospitals improve operation performance and patient satisfaction while supporting multiple RFID and RTLS technologies, has annouced that its InSites Connect RTLS mobility solution is now available in Apple’s App Store.
Sotera Wireless Reports FDA Clearance of ViSi Mobile System
ViaValve Safety I.V. Catheter Receives 510(k) Clearance from the U.S. FDA
Failure Reporting, Analysis and Corrective Action System Released
PROACTOnDemand, the new RCA SaaS Web Application for performing and delivering Root Cause Analysis developed by Reliability Center, Inc., of Hopewell, Virginia was awarded the Product of the Year Gold Award by Plant Engineering magazine readers in the Maintenance Software category.
CareFusion and Cerner Integrate Smart Pump Technologies to Help Improve Medication Safety and Efficiency
CareFusion and Cerner recently announced the live limited commercial release of a new infusion pump connectivity solution at Oklahoma Heart Hospital, one of the nation’s first all-digital hospitals exclusively focused on heart care.
Johns Hopkins Patient Safety Expert Peter Pronovost Earns Dual National Honors
Peter Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D., F.C.C.M., a world-renowned patient safety champion who’s devoted his career to making hospitals and health care safer for patients by reducing medical errors and avoidable harm, is the recipient of two national honors.
International ACS NSQIP Scholarships 2012
The American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP) offers International ACS NSQIP Scholarships for two surgeons from countries other than the United States or Canada who demonstrate strong interests in surgical quality improvement.