-
Just about everyone agrees that alarm management is a big issue in healthcare.
-
If you have tried looking for specific information on the National Quality Forum (NQF) website and been flummoxed by too many or too few query responses, you might want to check out the new Field Guide to NQF Resources.
-
Checklists are often touted as the potential cure for the ill that is patient harm. If it works for the aerospace industry, why can't it work for healthcare? Indeed, there is ample evidence that some checklists can make a big difference in patient safety.
-
There has been an intense focus on reducing unplanned readmissions in hospitals. Payers are refusing to pay for them, and increasingly the public believes that they are a determinant of the level of quality of care a particular facility provides to patients. But a study in the June issue of Health Affairs1 indicates that looking at this single data point doesn't tell the whole quality story.
-
Talk about surgical safety and people will automatically think of issues like objects left in a patient after closing or operating on the wrong site. Surgical-site infections are a hot topic. But surgical scheduling? Put that in the PubMed search engine and not much comes up. Add the term "patient safety" and you get a single, lonely article.
-
Every parent of a toddler knows that a time-out isn't so much a punishment for the child as a moment to breathe for the parent. It's this moment of calm that is the basis for the use of time-outs in a variety of fields, including surgical medicine. It's a chance to stop and make sure the path you are on is correct. And it's a tool that anyone can use, says Vicki Hess, RN, MS, principle at Catalyst Consulting, based in Baltimore, MD.
-
Wrong-site surgery: 20 times a week. Wrong surgery on a patient: 20 times a week. Object left in a patient: nearly 40 times a week. Surgical "never events": more than 4,000 times a year. Those statistics were reported in a study published in April in the journal Surgery.1 With such statistics, there will never be a single solution that makes surgery safer.
-
No one expects everyone to read through the 1,000-plus pages of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) proposals for 2014. But there are parts of the proposal that impact quality departments, and they demand some study.
-
Open enrollment for coverage under the new healthcare marketplaces is set to open in about three month, and opponents of the law are raising new concerns with the plans.
-
What information do you need that you are not getting today, in order to be successful in your job?
