NPSF Announces 2012 Patient Safety Awareness Week Campaign

Oct. 4, 2011—The National Patient Safety Foundation today announced its 2012 Patient Safety Awareness Week campaign, Be Aware for Safe Care. Patient Safety Awareness Week will take place March 4-10, 2012. This year’s theme highlights the need for everyone to understand the importance of patient safety and to recognize the range of efforts being made to improve health safety in the US and worldwide.

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Story Power

Editor’s Notebook

Story Power

The patient safety community generally understands the value of stories as a way to honor the experience of people who have been harmed by medical error, to humanize efforts to improve safety, and to inspire the will to change. I had an experience in August that demonstrated just how powerful and disarming these stories can be.

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Web 3.0 Data-Mining for Comparative Effectiveness and CDS

Health IT & Quality

Web 3.0 Data-Mining for Comparative Effectiveness and CDS

“Turbulent times” accurately describes the state of the American healthcare system. The list of critical challenges is well known—upward spiraling healthcare costs now approaching 17% of GDP, healthcare payment reform, shortage of clinical professionals, aging population, and the economic downturn.

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Scanner Beep Only Means the Barcode Has Been Scanned

ISMP

Scanner Beep Only Means the Barcode Has Been Scanned

You might find it hard to believe that wrong patient and wrong drug/dose/time errors can still happen when using a bedside barcode scanning system. One source of error stems from the fact that, regardless of whether the correct product has been scanned or an associated warning has been issued, audible barcode scanners produce the same beeping sound.

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Working Together for Patients with Limited Proficiency in English

Medical Interpretation

Working Together for Patients with Limited Proficiency in English

Effective communication between the patient and the medical provider plays a vital role in the delivery of high-quality medical care. But what if that patient is a non-English speaker? Not only do healthcare facilities have a duty to provide language assistance services to limited-English proficient (LEP) patients to ensure quality medical care, but currently there are requirements for equal language access that recipients of federal funding must adhere to.

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