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Health care professionals are familiar with the "time out" surgical teams take before beginning an operation. Teams check and validate vital information on each patent in order to prevent drastic mistakes.
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In today's healthcare environment, as patients are being discharged from the hospital sicker and quicker than ever before, some patients are in and out of the hospital as if they are going through a revolving door, says Catherine M. Mullahy, RN, BS, CRRN, CCM, president and founder of Mullahy & Associates, a case management training and consulting company based in Huntington, NY.
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To prevent hospital admissions, gather as much information as possible about the patient's discharge needs, psycho-social needs, and support systems in the community, Cory Sevin, RN, MSN, NP, director with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement advises. Talk to family members and primary care providers who know the patient and can provide first-hand information, Sevin says.
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Hospital ethics boards now can refer to national guidelines when developing procedural standards and processes for evaluating quality of ethics consultations (EC) and institutional EC processes.
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Hospital ethics committees sometimes are called to handle cases involving donation after cardiac death (DCD), but handling these cases can be a challenge, an expert says.
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Hospitals might improve their ethics consultation processes if they design and use a brief ethics family assessment tool to determine families' and patients' values, two ethicists say.
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Hospital ethics boards seeking a solution for efficiently and effectively documenting and assessing ethics consultation work could find a best practice in the ethics consultation web (ECWeb) program developed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in Washington, DC, experts say.
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President Obama's administration reversed its decision to revise a Medicare regulation to include paying physicians to discuss good advance care planning with patients.
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Hospital ethics committees could clarify and improve the way they handle issues involving life support in the intensive care unit (ICU) if they brought more nuance to any definition of the word "futile," an expert says.
