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Clinical alert fatigue remains a vexing problem for health care providers, and the risk to patient safety is high. When clinicians become so annoyed by alarms that they disable them, or so used to hearing them that they do not respond appropriately, patient's lives can be at stake.
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Alert fatigue can lead to behaviors in health care that may seem fine until the day they cause a tragedy, says John Banja, PhD, assistant director for health sciences and clinical ethics at Emory University in Atlanta.
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A hospital's attempt to prepare for armed intruders took a bad turn when a drill simulating a man with a gun taking over a patient care unit was too real for some staff. Many did not know that it was a drill and were severely traumatized. Plus, the clinicians were kept from their critically ill patients until the drill was cancelled.
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The proposed HITECH rules require covered entities to provide the recipient of any fundraising communication with a "clear and conspicuous" opportunity to opt out of receiving any further fundraising communications.
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Involve physicians in the development and implementation of alert systems, rather than simply training them in the systems when you're ready to go live, says Linda Peitzman, MD, chief medical officer of Wolters Kluwer Health in Indianapolis.
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The fake terror drill that left staff traumatized and the hospital facing a state investigation was a "very painful lesson," says Chief Operations Officer Teressa Conley, RN, MBA, MSN, EA, at St. Rose Dominican Hospital in Henderson, NV.
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Patients who sue their surgeons for malpractice are more frequently receiving indemnity payments for increasingly larger amounts, according to a study of 3,300 cases across several states over a recent six-year period.
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Health care providers are becoming more open to the media and willing to comply with requests for access that in years past would never have been allowed, but a television series is raising questions about how much media access is too much.
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Many people, including a lot of risk managers, thought The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore was taking a huge risk when it allowed ABC television crews extensive access to produce the groundbreaking series "Hopkins 24/7" in 2000. But the experience was overwhelmingly positive, says Gary M. Stephenson, MS, senior associate director for media relations and public affairs with Johns Hopkins Medicine.
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Violence can be reduced in hospitals only by addressing the issue head on, says Tony Kubica, a founding partner of Kubica Laforest Consulting in Warwick, RI, and formerly a hospital executive in charge of security.
