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Patient safety can be jeopardized when the transitions or handoffs that occur during patient care are not managed effectively. Many errors come from slips that occur during the exchange of materials, people, and/or supplies.
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Quality improvement projects can be especially challenging if you try to implement them on a systemwide basis across many health care institutions, but a diabetes project in Iowa shows that it can be done if you give people the tools and let individual organizations decide how best to use them.
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Several important changes were announced to Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health-care Organizations surveyors at a recent training session in Chicago, including new definitions for some types of sentinel events.
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This article reviews multiple aspects of heart failure, providing direction for workup and management of heart failure patients. All recommendations follow current published guidelines. Unresolved and controversial issues are reviewed, and future therapies are proposed.
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Like most states, California does not stand out as a champion of end-of-life care. Public policy, health care traditions, and social attitudes have prevented the states terminally ill patients from gaining access to palliative care and end-of-life care as a whole.
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If you ask a group of home health care workers and volunteers if theyve ever felt threatened or uncomfortable when paying a visit to a clients home, its likely that each would have a story to tell.
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Home care providers still struggle to obtain authorizations from managed care organizations (MCOs) for medically necessary and appropriate care. MCOs may bear the risk of any legal liability associated with failure to provide medically necessary and appropriate care, especially when provider protest such adverse payment decisions.
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Unlike other specialties in health care, family members as well as the patient are considered clients for the hospice team. Therefore, the specialized services available from hospice clinicians and volunteers are intended to address the physical, spiritual, social, cognitive, and emotional needs of the entire family system. Yet, understanding the family dynamic and how it should influence care can be a challenge.
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For many hospice professionals, dying in an intensive care unit (ICU) may seem like the antithesis of the gentle, peaceful death experience they try to facilitate every day for terminally ill patients and their families. Other than a vague sense that intensive care for dying patients might be futile and even wasteful -- or that those patients should have been referred to hospice care instead -- hospice professionals may not pay much attention to what goes on in the ICU, even within their own health systems.
