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The story hits the news every once in a while, but it always seems like such an extreme case: A hospital staffer confesses to killing multiple patients over time, usually with fatal injections and often under the pretense of a "mercy killing."
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Having made infection control and patient safety top priorities in recent years, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations is now taking on the thorny issue of flu vaccinations for health care workers in a new standard that becomes effective next year.
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More than a decade of research in aviation has shown how critical effective teamwork is to flight safety. Both the armed services and commercial aviation organizations have standardized training systems in place for teamwork.
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Lack of consensus on how to measure hand hygiene compliance has made this a daunting challenge for quality professionals. To address this, the Joint Commission has partnered with infection control organizations to identify how to measure compliance with hand hygiene guidelines.
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If you don't measure quality accurately, your organization could face dire consequences ranging from financial problems to plummeting patient satisfaction scores.
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With the growing emphasis on pay for performance initiatives, quality professionals are seeing their roles change very quickly.
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At Sacred Heart Hospital in Allentown, PA, patient-centered collaboration between the case management department and other areas, such as quality, nursing, inpatient and outpatient providers, the residency program, and the legal and finance departments, has had a dramatic impact on quality.
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At Fairview Hospital, a small critical access facility in Great Barrington, MA, a decision was made in spring 2005 to switch to an integrated system for performance measurement and improvement.
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Supreme Court: Rules on EMRs not too lax; Report: Lax handling of doctors who do crimes?
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The American Nurses Association (ANA) is looking back on the role of nurses during and after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and wants to take what was learned during that time, coupled with the ANA Code of Ethics, and come up with guidelines and policies to assist nurses in making ethical decisions during disasters.