Patient handoff now is known to be a high-risk time, with the transfer of responsibilities opening up the potential for misunderstandings, incomplete information, and other failures of communication that can threaten patient safety.
While SBAR (Situation, Background, Assessment, and Recommendation) technique is a fairly straightforward concept, implementing the methodology can be more difficult than you might expect.
A recent settlement by a New Jersey hospital chain should alert risk managers that federal investigators are taking a harder look at charge increases and possible violations of Medicare rules, says an attorney who has been following the case.
Wandering occurs in 15%-60% of people with dementia.
When Our Lady of Lourdes in Pasco, WA, brought in outside engineers to give them a fresh perspective on reducing falls, the team came up with several solutions.
You probably conduct fire drills, evacuation drills, infant abduction drills, and mass casualty drills, but there is one more you might want to add to the schedule: critical birth drills.
The following advice for conducting critical birth drills comes from Stanley Davis, MD, an OB-GYN specialist at Fairview Health Services in Minneapolis.
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) in Cambridge, MA, announced recently that U.S. hospitals taking part in an 18-month effort to prevent 100,000 unnecessary deaths by dramatically improving patient care have exceeded that goal.
More than three-fifths of Americans surveyed by the Health Coalition on Liability and Access (HCLA) support passage of comprehensive medical liability reform legislation.
News: Upon the premature birth of a baby, a doctor recommended a dose of aminophylline to treat the brief pauses in the infant's breathing.
