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The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in Rockville, MD, recently released 17 new toolkits to help health care providers and patients prevent medical errors.
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News: A nursing home resident with a history of difficulty in swallowing choked to death while eating a piece of brisket. Although staff attempted to perform the Heimlich maneuver and CPR on her, the woman died.
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Health care workers who were vaccinated as children may be protected against fatal smallpox infection even if they declined to participate in recent immunization efforts, according to a recent study.
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Graduates of certain U.S. medical schools are more likely to be sued than others, according to a recent report in a safety journal (Quality and Safety in Health Care 2003; 12:330-336).
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More than one-third of hospital medication errors that reach the patient involve seniors, making them an especially vulnerable population in U.S. health care facilities, according to the most recent data on adverse events collected by the United States Pharmacopeia, a nonprofit organization in Rockville, MD.
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Pediatrics program just the beginning of safety overhaul; Duke identifies corrective plan of action for patient safety
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A 16-year-old high school football star was in the back seat of a car when the driver lost control and ran off the road. He underwent emergency surgery at a hospital for a ruptured stomach. However, the treating physicians and staff failed to diagnose and treat his fractured spine. The delay in treatment and failure to immobilize the patient resulted in the teen-ager being permanently paralyzed.
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While recovering from emergency surgery, a 71-year old patient developed decubitus ulcers acute enough to cause nerve damage and necessitate plastic surgery. The hospital staff and two attending physicians failed to closely monitor the elderly patient during recovery despite his known underlying complications, which included alcohol dependency and heavy smoking.
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The University of Illinois Hospital has paid $2.3 million to settle a lawsuit that charged it and two other school-affiliated hospitals with manipulating patients diagnoses to get them new livers.
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The U.S. District Court in Cheyenne, WY, has awarded $50,000 to a woman stuck by a used needle while visiting a patient at one of Banner Health Systems hospitals in that state. A hospital employee had left the needle lodged in a heat register.
