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When a patient in a wheelchair needs to get from an upper floor to street level after dialysis, the elevators are inoperable.
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During a July 2003 Joint Commission survey at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, two areas took center stage: patient safety and performance improvement. Everywhere surveyors went, they would ask staff what they have done to improve patient safety in the area, and what the area has done for performance improvement, reports Sharon A. Chinn, RN, the facilitys patient care services manager of regulations and outcomes.
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When you do a root-cause analysis or educate staff about improving patient safety, do you sometimes feel your message is all doom and gloom? If so, take note of a growing trend, which spotlights events that went well, as opposed to what went wrong.
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Health care quality managers often oversee patient safety activities in a variety of health care settings. One area of considerable media attention right now is the quality of nursing home care. Because many integrated health care delivery systems include some level of long-term care, quality managers need to understand high-priority resident safety concerns so that effective monitoring and improvement initiatives can be developed.
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To provide you with critical information on the updated regulations from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Thomson American Health Consultants offers New EMTALA Regulations: Are They Too Good to be True? an audio conference on Tuesday, Oct. 21, from 2:30-3:30 p.m., EST.
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Here are a two frequently asked questions from the Department of Health and Human Services HIPAA web site that specifically address the types of communication that case managers and discharge planners engage in
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Even with their dependence on health maintenance organizations (HMOs), many of the nations elderly suffer from a lack of coordinated care, are often confused about their treatment - including proper use of medications - and frequently end up in the hospital for lack of proper preventive measures.
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When the lights go out, brace yourself for a surge in patients even if things seem relatively peaceful. That was the lesson learned during the blackout that recently crippled the northeastern United States.
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Very few hospitals have policies that allow family access during resuscitation and other treatment in the ED, even though research has shown that the public overwhelmingly desires it and a growing number of emergency physicians and nurses support the idea.
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Flexibility is the key word when developing a policy on family access, says Stephen Epstein, MD, MPP, spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians and clinical operations director at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Understanding the familys needs is important, but they must be balanced with patient safety.
