-
Handling mental illness during pregnancy can be a double-edged sword. Because of the scarcity of clinical research with pregnant women, there are no FDA-approved medications for treating such illnesses.
-
At this year's annual conference of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, held in October in Washington, DC, one of the new discussions was on the top legal developments in bioethics in 2009.
-
Much attention has been focused in the past on the role of hope in healing or in dealing with a terminal illness.
-
Planned Parenthood's entity serving Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota (PPMNS) is continuing legal action in an effort to have certain legislatively mandated scripts to be read by physicians to women seeking abortions in South Dakota.
-
The Obama administration earlier this year acted to rescind the so-called "Bush rule" regarding the rights of health care providers related to conscientious refusal.
-
Looking at the historically low compliance numbers surrounding hand hygiene, Stephen Weber, MD, Joint Commission consultant and chief health care epidemiologist at the University of Chicago Medical Center, can only shake his head.
-
The fact that The Joint Commission had to recently issue a Sentinel Event Alert underscoring leadership's critical role in patient safety and quality care is "somewhat sad," notes Ronald B. Goodspeed, MD, MPH, FACP, FACPE, an instructor on health care management in the department of health policy and management, Harvard School of Public Health and former president of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Prevention of Medical Errors.
-
A hand hygiene project launched at The Joint Commission's Center for Transforming Healthcare cites the following problems and solutions on hand hygiene:
-
When hospitalists use discharge communication software, patients and the outpatient doctors who carry out the care have better perceptions of the quality of the discharge process, according to new research published in the August issue of the Journal of Hospital Medicine.
-
A combination of face-to-face and telephonic case management has resulted in high patient satisfaction ratings and a significant decrease in health care utilization for patients with complex medical needs.