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With 45 million people in the United States speaking a language other than English and another 19 million people with limited proficiency in English, it is more important than ever for same-day surgery programs to make sure that interpreters are available and qualified to translate pre-op and discharge instructions.
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Voicing ever stronger concerns that the health care community still is not doing enough to prevent wrong-site surgery, the Joint
Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations recently called on all providers to adopt a no-nonsense, zero-tolerance policy toward that grave error.
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At a recent press conference concerning the Universal Protocol to prevent wrong-site surgery, proponents answered some of the most frequent questions about how to follow the protocol.
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A nurse who admitted to authorities that he killed 30-40 severely ill patients is putting the spotlight on the difficulty of investigating the backgrounds of those applying for patient care positions in health care, says the CEO of the hospital where many of the deaths are thought to have occurred.
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Educating physicians about risk management issues can be difficult and time-consuming, so its tempting to let your insurer send in a speaker once in a while and leave it at that. But the risk manager at a Texas hospital says youll get better results by developing your own in-house education program for physicians.
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The Medical Board of California has issued a severe reprimand to a physician accused of providing inadequate pain relief to a dying man, requiring him to attend advanced training to improve his performance.
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A woman in labor told an attending nurse that she thought the hospital and the obstetrician were not attending to her in a timely manner. The labor and delivery nurse contacted her obstetrician, but he failed to appropriately respond. The nurse should have contacted her supervisors about the womans concerns and the physicians failure to take action, but didnt. The fetus suffered severe brain damage because of a delay in delivery and subsequently died 11 months later.
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One of the great challenges in the whole world of quality and patient safety is learning to take advantage of the richness of clinical cases, says Robert M. Wachter, MD, professor and associate chairman in the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and chief of the medical service at UCSF Medical Center.
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Its 3 a.m., and you get a call from the emergency department. The staff is in a heated dispute with a local police officer whos demanding information about a patient who assaulted another while waiting to be transferred to inpatient care. Your staff is worried about violating patient privacy. The officer is complaining loudly that the hospital is obstructing a criminal investigation. Whats a risk manager to do?
