Patient Safety

NPSF Awards Research Grants for Patient Safety Projects

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The National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) announced on May 9 that it has awarded a total of $200,000 in grants for two innovative patient safety research projects. The grants are awarded through the NPSF Research Grants Program, which promotes studies leading to the prevention of human errors, system errors, patient injuries, and their consequences.

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Patient Safety

Psych Patients Need Patience in the ER, Average Wait 11 Hours

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Patients having psychiatric emergencies wait 11.5 hours in the emergency department, and those who are older, uninsured or intoxicated wait even longer, according to a study published online recently in Annals of Emergency Medicine (“Patient and Practice-Related Determinants of Emergency Department Length of Stay for Patients with Psychiatric Illness”).

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Accreditation & Regulation

ANA and AONE Release Joint Principles of Collaboration

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Communication and collaboration are critical elements of success for effective work environments, particularly in health care. When these elements break down, the result can be a cascade of negative events. Yet when collaboration is strong, it reaps positive benefits on the workplace culture and patient outcomes.

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Risk Management

The Risk of Workarounds

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By Tim Vanderveen, PharmD, MS

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.

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Patient Safety

Another Way to Do Harm

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By Susan Carr

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.

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