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You are on duty in the ED when the paramedics bring in a patient from the county jail who had tried to hang himself. When the patient arrives, you are told by the accompanying guard that the patient was found with a tightly twisted bedsheet around his neck and looped over the bedpost of the metal bunkbed.
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Despite dramatic and widely reported breakthroughs in preventing bloodstream infections, the cold truth is that too many infection preventionists labor in obscurity, their programs woefully underfunded by administrators blind to the power of prevention.
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Hospitalized patients with terminal illnesses often feel abandoned by their physicians at the end of their lives. Their physicians might experience a lack of closure that is unsettling.
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The health care system benefits when unnecessary hospital admissions are avoided, and sometimes the best place to impact that trend is by focusing discharge services on the hospital emergency department (ED), an expert says.
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Calling patients after hospital discharge is a good quality improvement and patient satisfaction strategy, but it is often difficult to implement because of resource restraints.
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Mistakes happen even to the best clinicians. This is why hospitals increasingly are relying on checklists and other tools to assist clinicians in the discharge process.
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Here's a common hospital discharge scenario: the patient is ready to be discharged home, and the hospital has a discharge planner or case manager who is prepared to call the patient's primary care physician (PCP) to discuss the patient's post-discharge care. But who does the discharge planner call? And will anyone respond to the call?