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Is your intubated patient being transporte d for radiological studies? This increases the chance of disastrous consequences due to an unrecognized displaced or dislodged endotracheal (ET) tube, warns Catherine Payne, RN, MSN, CCRN, CEN, an ED nurse at the University of California Davis Medical Center in Sacramento.
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If a patient reports taking antibiotics during your medication reconciliation, you may learn these were prescribed for a urinary tract infection or dental work months earlier. "For whatever reason, they didn't take the antibiotics as prescribed, and now they will take a pill whenever they have a sore throat," says Kimberly Barker, BS, RN, CEN, an ED supervisor at St. David's South Austin (TX) Medical Center.
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Whether a claim against an emergency physician (EP) is ultimately settled, defended, or dismissed, taking an upfront approach has resulted in quicker resolution of claims, reports Ryan Domengeaux, vice-president of enterprise risk management and internal counsel for Schumacher Group, an emergency medicine practice management company in Lafayette, LA.
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Under what circumstances might a plaintiff's team be willing to drop the emergency physician (EP) involved in a lawsuit and allow the hospital to settle with the patient?
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Plaintiff attorneys continue efforts to turn ordinary "failure to diagnose" malpractice claims into claims for "failure to provide an appropriate medical screening exam" under federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act EMTALA.
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The vast majority of emergency nurses, during their entire career, will never be involved in a lawsuit, even as a witness, much less as a named defendant, according to Edie Brous, RN, Esq., a New York City-based nurse attorney. "There are many misperceptions about liability exposure," she says. "Although the fear of liability has increased, actual lawsuits, in fact, have not."
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Generally speaking, when an emergency physician (EP) loses a trial, it may take him or her a long time to recover personally, psychologically, and emotionally. "But with a few rather glaring exceptions, the public is unaware of that in large measure," according to Joseph P. McMenamin, MD, JD, FCLM, a partner at Richmond, VA-based McGuireWoods and a former practicing EP.
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Agreeing to settle a plaintiff's claim alleging ED malpractice may not sound like a good idea to the emergency physician (EP) named in the lawsuit, but, in fact, this course of action is often in everybody's best interest.
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Hospitals across the country are scrambling to improve patient satisfaction so that they won't be dinged by a provision in the Accountable Care Act that will put a portion of Medicare dollars at risk, based on the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Services (HCAPS) surveys.
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Hospitals could potentially save millions of dollars by swapping commonly prescribed intravenous (IV) medications with their oral equivalents in patients who can safely take medications by mouth, according to a new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD. The research, which was published in the journal Clinical Therapeutics,
