-
Sometimes the most effective strategies for those problems that plague every health care facility are not high tech and don't require a highly paid consultant.
-
A middle-aged man was taken to the hospital complaining of pain in his lower back and abdomen. The man was given pain medication and a muscle relaxant and discharged. After his pain persisted, the man went to another hospital, where he was given anti-inflammatory medications and discharged. A few days later, the man was taken by ambulance back to the first hospital, where he suffered cardiac arrest and died.
-
After an extraordinary 14 years of litigation, a Broward County, FL, jury recently entered a $30 million verdict against a hospital and an obstetrician for damages arising out of the birth of a child with brain damage.
-
Violence in the emergency department (ED) is such a common occurrence that staff can become complacent about the risks they face daily. Nowhere else in your organization would employees accept the idea that they may be assaulted at any time, but that attitude can be common in the ED.
-
Angry, violent individuals need specialized attention, and improperly handling a crisis can mean years of litigation, warns Robert Siciliano, CEO of NurseSecurity.com and a personal security expert in Boston. Fail to act properly and you could face liability from either the injured staff member or the assailant who was injured by your intervention. Or both.
-
The risk factors for an elderly patient living at home will be quite different from the risk factors for a patient in a hospital setting.
-
The Joint Commission's 2009 National Patient Safety Goals introduce some significant changes for hospitals related to multiple drug-resistant organisms (MDROs) and more stringent standards for how operative sites should be marked to avoid wrong-site errors.
-
A Pennsylvania jury has awarded $20 million to the family of an 18-year-old Newtown Square, PA, woman who died after a liposuction procedure.
-
Faced with an aging work force of nurses, hospitals are beginning to remake the work environment to keep nurses at the bedside. When the AARP released its list of the nation's 50 "Best Employers of People over 50" earlier this year, half of them were hospitals or other health care employers.
-
Employers have discovered a way to lower their health plan costs: Have healthier employees. Increasingly, employers are creating strong incentives for healthy behavior or penalizing employees with risky behavior, such as smoking. But employees aren't thrilled about the new approach, according to a survey by Hewitt Associates, a human resources consulting firm based in Lincolnshire, IL.
