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In a campaign that earned it the prestigious Ernest Amory Codman Award from The Joint Commission, Christiana Care Health Services of Wilmington, DE, reduced the mortality rate for patients with severe sepsis from 61.7% to 30.2% by addressing three major areas of sepsis care: identification of patients with sepsis, resuscitation strategies, and ICU management.
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The Joint Commission will soon be releasing a revised version of the universal protocol, reports Peter Angood, MD, vice president and chief patient safety officer for The Joint Commission.
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The error was as dramatic as it was unimaginable: Surgeons at Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park, MN, recently removed the wrong kidney from a patient with kidney cancer.
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If an emergency physician is arrested for assaulting a patient or for inappropriate sexual conduct, there is potential liability exposure for both the hospital where the ED is located and the emergency medicine (EM) group, says Thomas H. Taylor, a health care attorney at LaCrosse, WI-based Johns Flaherty.
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In the preamble to the new Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) regulations of 2003, some commenters stated that some physicians may choose to come to a hospital to see private patients at times when they are not shown as being on call under the listing the hospital maintains for EMTALA purposes, notes Alan Steinberg, Esq., an attorney with Horty Springer in Pittsburgh.
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When patients are discharged from the ED at Rice Memorial Hospital in Willmar, MN, they never need to worry about how and where to obtain their take-home meds. Since Sept. 19, 2007, they have been able to obtain their prescription meds directly from a "vending machine" located in the department and operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
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The New York State Supreme Court currently is hearing a case that addresses a dilemma many ED managers face every day: When is it permissible to force a patient to receive treatment?
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Every year The Joint Commission (TJC) identifies those standards and requirements that were most frequently identified as "not compliant" for the previous six-month period. For the most recent reporting period, Jan. 1, 2007, through June 30, 2007, the standard with the lowest compliance rate for hospitals was the National Patient Safety Goal for medication labeling, with a compliance rate of 17%.