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In its latest sentinel event alert, issued Nov. 17, The Joint Commission calls attentions to preventing suicide risks in the emergency department and medical/surgical unit and recommends educating clinicians, noting that many of these suicides are committed by patients who had no prior psychiatric history.
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Clutter. It's a huge problem. "It's probably the second most scored standard," says Kurt Patton, MS, RPh, CEO of Patton Healthcare Consulting in Glendale, AZ, and former executive director of accreditation services at The Joint Commission.
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If the thought of The Joint Commission surveying you on your environment of care or building safety makes you squirm, you're not the only one. And there's good reason.
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After one patient death in 2009, an error with an adult patient this year, followed by two patient deaths, Seattle Children's Hospital has been in a lot of discussions with not only the state's department of health and The Joint Commission, but the media and its staff as well.
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Eliminating needlesticks was once an official federal goal. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention promoted it as a "health care challenge." More modestly, Healthy People 2010 set a measurable goal of reducing needlesticks among hospital-based health care workers by 30%.
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The winner of the Healthcare Administrator Award from the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) is the chief executive officer of an ambulatory surgery center.
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In its previous "Recommended Practice for Surgical Attire," the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) didn't recommend home laundering, but for those facilities that did it, it offered some guidance on how to do it as safely as possible.
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A just-released study showing that smokers have significantly more complications post-surgery than non-smokers, including a higher death rate, coupled with new Medicare reimbursement for physicians who provide counseling to prevent tobacco use for outpatients and hospitalized patients have outpatient surgery managers taking a new look at smoking cessation programs.
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