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Nurses' aides have more serious work-related musculoskeletal injuries than any other occupation, and registered nurses rank fifth in MSDs despite years of efforts to promote safe patient handling. Those and other dismal injury statistics spurred the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration to announce new, targeted inspections of nursing homes, an action that could ultimately increase scrutiny of hospitals as well.
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No one enjoys paying their hospital professional liability (HPL) premiums, but paying too much is even worse. Your premium might be too high if the insurer is loading based on a broad geographical area, and it's up to you to ask the right questions.
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Some of the best ways to prevent falls require personal, hands-on attention to individual patients, but hospitals don't have enough staff to provide as much of that tending as they would like. One hospital has found that volunteers are eager to do the job, and it has cut falls by a whopping 46% as a result.
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Two years of the Fall Prevention -- Safety Monitor Volunteer Program at Hartford (CT) Hospital have yielded significant results, says Christine Waszynski, APRN, a geriatric nurse practitioner and clinical nurse specialist in the geriatrics program. (See the charts above and on p. 20.) In addition to reducing falls 46%, analysis of the bed check results shows these findings:
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The second annual benchmark study by Ponemon Institute in Traverse City, MI, sponsored by ID Experts, finds that the frequency of data breaches in healthcare organizations surveyed has increased by 32%.
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Hospitals are bringing more self-employed physicians on board as employees, which can bring benefits to both parties, but it brings a potential problem for risk managers. What do you do about tail insurance?
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Because clinical evaluation often depends on diagnostic tests, diagnostic physicians have a responsibility to notify referring clinicians when test results reveal urgent or unexpected findings. According to a report in the Journal of the American College of Radiology (JACR), the rapid growth of diagnostic testing appears to be placing physicians at greater risk for medical malpractice claims for test communication failures.
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Deciding who pays for a new physician's tail coverage usually hinges on who has the leverage in the hiring situation, says Mary Anne Hilliard, JD, BSN, CPHRM, chief risk counsel with Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC, and president of the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management (ASHRM) in Chicago.
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News: A 14-year-old boy was taken to a local hospital emergency department (ED) with complaints of sharp pain on the right side of his face and his right shoulder after being kicked in the head by his mother. The boy reported that his pain level was 10 on a scale of 1-10; however, the triage nurse indicated his was a "non-urgent" case.
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