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Health care organizations everywhere are using focus groups of consumers to critique services, rate educational materials, offer feedback on patient safety, or register kudos and gripes about the quality of patient care.
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Serious adverse events can result when unauthorized family members, caregivers, or clinicians administer patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) for the patient by proxy, warns a Sentinel Event Alert issued by the JCAHO.
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Imagine the moment when surveyors leave after your next Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) survey or when you just have submitted your organizations periodic performance review (PPR). You may be tempted to breathe a sigh of relief but if noncompliant areas are identified, your work has just begun.
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If youre expecting that the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations proposed revisions to medication management standards will add to your workload, youre probably right.
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Measuring the effectiveness of actions intended to improve patient care is an important element of performance improvement. Effectiveness evaluation determines whether an intervention has had the intended effect.
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During an April 2005 survey at Fort Sanders Sevier Medical Center in Sevierville, TN, JCAHO surveyors used the Survey Activity Guide (SAG) as their own guide for every system tracer they did, reports Nancy Van Voorhis, RN, CPHQ, manager of quality and clinical care. As we sat down at the system tracer sessions, the surveyors would pull out their SAG section on that system tracer. So my best advice is to use the Survey Activity Guide for your prep tool. We did, and we did fine.
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Increased public scrutiny of hospital performance on surgical infection prevention measures will continue, quality leaders predict. From the point of view of quality managers, this is a wonderful thing, says Terry Hill, MD, medical director for quality improvement at San Francisco-based Lumetra.
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One of the biggest discharge planning challenges at Sutter General Hospital in Sacramento, CA, involves patients who need dialysis after they come into the hospital, says Kate Tenney, RN, manager of case management.
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An unusual collaboration among three competing California hospitals is providing much-needed post-discharge care for homeless people. It is linking those individuals to ongoing medical benefits while freeing up hospital beds for more acute patients.