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Impaired healthcare workers (HCWs) can pose a serious threat to patient safety, but they must be handled carefully and with respect to their own health conditions. Risk managers must ensure their organizations are prepared to protect patient safety while also working to help impaired HCWs receive treatment and return to work.
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For decades, risk managers have tried to improve safety by encouraging patients and family members to speak up when they are concerned about care or suspect something might be wrong. Some progress has been made, but recent data suggest one group remains reluctant to speak up: the parents of pediatric patients.
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In this post hoc analysis of the SPICE III trial, a greater percentage of patients receiving dexmedetomidine had temperatures greater than or equal to 38.3ºC and 39.0ºC compared to usual care. Although there was a significant dose response relationship between dexmedetomidine received and increase in temperature, there was no difference between groups in terms of paracetamol, antimicrobial, neuromuscular blocker, neuroleptic drug use, blood cultures performed, or initiation of renal replacement therapy.
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Using newer methodology in network meta-analysis to compare various protective mechanical ventilation strategies, the authors concluded that a low tidal volume strategy combined with prone ventilation was associated with the greatest risk reduction in mortality for moderate to severe acute respiratory distress syndrome.
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Biomarkers have become an important tool for the early recognition and prognostication of acute kidney injury. In the last few years, several biomarkers have emerged that have shown promising results in large-scale clinical studies.
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Social scientists provide invaluable data for disaster and hazard research as they study human predictability, risk, and the consequences of such events. However, social scientists are not the only ones researching natural or man-made disasters. Disaster research also can include teams of engineers, urban planners, risk analysts, and public health administrators.
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There appears to be a significant difference in start-up times for large cardiovascular trials in North America, highlighting changes needed for trials to become more efficient and feasible.
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For patients and families, a combination ED-ICU means avoiding costly ICU admissions that do not align with care goals. For health systems, it means alleviating ICU capacity strain.
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Ninety percent of 585 of board-certified healthcare chaplains said advance care planning is important to their work, 70% regularly help patients complete paperwork after discussions, 90% facilitate discussions with patients about their preferences, and 45% reported they were not consistently included in team discussions on decision-making.
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Researchers were surprised that despite ongoing efforts to develop research ethics programs over many years in the United States and internationally, there was no published competency framework to follow, nor was there a standard approach to creating competencies in this context. This, despite the fact competencies have been used for education in business, medicine, and elsewhere for decades.
