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A terrifying failure during general anesthesia, once thought to be so rare that it did not warrant much attention, actually is common enough that risk managers should launch a specific, focused effort at reducing the problem, known as anesthesia awareness.
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Anesthesia awareness is not just a problem for the anesthesia department. That was a key message of JCAHO when it issued its recent Sentinel Event Alert on the issue.
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The movement to prevent wrong-site or wrong-person surgery got another boost recently when a major health plan announced that on Jan. 1, 2005, it will stop paying for medical procedures involving those egregious errors.
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Los Angeles County officials reported recently that a patient at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center died after a nurse turned down an audio alarm on his vital signs monitor and then failed to notice that he was having a heart attack.
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This case primarily deals with the issues of delay in diagnosis and delay in informing the patient of test results and the appropriate diagnosis. Communication with patients is critical and, if not handled properly, can be disastrous.
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The recent warnings that children using certain antidepressants may be at increased risk to become suicidal and charges that previous studies pointing out the problem were kept from public view have reverberated throughout the research community.
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Using visual aids in the informed consent process can significantly improve comprehension of issues such as risks and confidentiality, according to a study of pregnant women in Pune, India.
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Current use of gastric acid-suppressive therapy was associated with an increased risk of community-acquired pneumonia.
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The relative risk for each 1% increase in hemoglobin A1c was 1.3 for CHD, 1.2 for CVD, and 1.2 for all cause mortality.