Same-Day Surgery – April 1, 2015
April 1, 2015
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Adverse Events Can Happen When Staff Try to Maintain Equipment
The incident started with good intentions.
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Trail of tears: Fired drug-diverting workers free to find another healthcare facility
A nurse stealing morphine by replacing it with saline in a medication vial might not have realized she was colonized with Serratia marcescens, a gram negative bacteria that would soon find its way into the bloodstreams of a cluster of patients administered the contaminated solution. The insult of denied pain treatment was followed by the injury of infection, which proved fatal in one patient. That scenario is under investigation at a Wisconsin hospital, the latest in a series of outbreaks linked to drug-diverting healthcare workers. (See second story that follows.)
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Nationwide focus is growing on issues surrounding injection safety
There is an increasing focus on safe use of needles and vials, which was the subject of a Sentinel Event Alert from The Joint Commission last year, says Vicki Allen, MSN, RN, CIC, infection prevention coordinator at Beaufort (SC) Memorial Hospital.1
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Serratia outbreak linked to drug diversion
A former nurse at the University of Wisconsin (UW) Hospital and Clinics in Madison, who allegedly diverted pain medication for personal use, might be linked to a cluster of infections among patients in the units where she worked, UW officials say.
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Freestanding EDs and urgent care centers as new sources of surgical referrals
One question I’m frequently asked is how to increase referrals to surgeons in the hospital or freestanding ambulatory surgery center (ASC) arenas.
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Smaller outpatient facilities struggle to achieve regulatory compliance with HIPAA
An outpatient surgery facility gives a research organization a patient’s protected health information (PHI) for recruitment, but it didn’t have the patient’s authorization or a signed waiver of authorization approved by the Institutional Review Board or privacy board.
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FDA says to inform patients about risk of endoscopy linked to CRE infections
ERCP (endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography), an upper endoscopy procedure performed on some half a million U.S. patients annually, poses a risk of transmission of practically untreatable carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE).
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CMS addresses lower relative humidity in ORs
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has provided information on operating room (OR) relative humidity (RH) for ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) and supplemental information for hospitals and critical access hospitals (CAHs) using the categorical waiver of Life Safety Code (LSC) Anesthetizing Location RH Requirements.
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ASCA: New quality measures are likely
The Measure Applications Partnership has issued a draft recommendation supporting two additional measures in the Ambulatory Surgery Center Quality Reporting Program. The Partnership guides the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on performance measures.