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Question: How much should our risk management department take responsibility for preventing slips and falls in the facility, as opposed to letting environmental services handle that issue? I know were responsible for any resulting litigation, but shouldnt prevention really be their job, not mine?
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A new survey of physicians, nurses, and hospital administrators suggests that malpractice concerns are leading to the practice of more and more defensive medicine. Large numbers of medical doctors report that they order more tests, refer more patients, prescribe more medication, and suggest biopsies more often than is necessary because of concerns about malpractice.
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News: A woman died following a liver biopsy performed at an outpatient facility by a resident physician. The resident was inexperienced and punctured her lung. Unaware of the injury, the resident and supervising physician left the patients bedside, and shortly thereafter she aspirated on her own blood and died.
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News: After a hospital hired a patient care technician who had a rape conviction, suit was brought against the hospital by a patient alleging sexual assault by the hospital employee.
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Translating medical information for patients who dont speak English has always been a difficult issue for health care providers, but evidence is mounting to suggest that health care providers risk major lawsuits from medical errors traced to inadequate translation.
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The National Quality Forum (NQF) announced recently that it had approved 26 safe practices that should be universally utilized in health care to reduce the risk of adverse events. Four additional practices will continue to be evaluated and may be approved in the coming months.
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Recent news reports of patients who lived for months with surgical items mistakenly left in them has spurred the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) to urge that such incidents be reported to the national system it has set up to record such errors.
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There is an extremely high level of confusion, misunderstanding, frustration, anxiety, fear, and anger in a broad range of people and organizations as the April 14 compliance date for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy rule nears. Thats the finding of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, a statutory public advisory body to the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) in the area of health data and statistics.
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If youre not moving, start. On April 14, covered entities under HIPAA are expected to be in compliance with the new Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information.
