ABQAURP News

ASQ Healthcare Division Newsletter

ASQ Healthcare Division Newsletter

ABQAURP News

Editor’s Notebook

PSQH Turns Five

By Susan Carr

With this issue, Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare (PSQH)
reaches its fifth anniversary, which prompts me to take a moment and
think about how much the world has changed and stayed the same in the
past five years. When we published the first issue, in July 2004, the
patient safety community was discussing how much progress—if any—had
been made since the IOM published To Err Is Human five years earlier, and now we are assessing progress made over the past 10 years.

Letters

Is Heparin Therapy Outmoded?

Dager et al. offer expert, useful, and pertinent advice regarding safe use of heparin (“Heaparin: Improving Treatment and Reducing Risk of Harm,”
Jan/Feb 2009). They miss the salient opportunity to make an even
stronger case: heparin is outmoded therapy, and should be replaced by
use of low- and ultra-low molecular heparins (LMWHs), except perhaps in
certain circumstances. LMWHs have been used for more than 20 years in
Europe and have been approved for use in the United States since the
early 1990s.

AHRQ

Patient Safety Councils:
A New Tool for Patient Safety

By Carolyn M. Clancy, MD

Nearly 10 years after the Institute of Medicine’s To Err Is Human
report (2000) galvanized the national patient safety movement,
healthcare providers and organizations have re-tooled many of their
inpatient processes, systems, and training programs as they aim to
deliver safer medical care.