-
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.
-
Sentinel events at Childrens Hospital Boston have been traced to poor communication between residents and attending physicians, prompting a federal investigation and a plan by the hospital to overhaul how the two groups interact. The hospital is responding to the tragedies with a plan designed to make sure that attending physicians dont leave the younger physicians with too much responsibility by poorly communicating.
-
Everyone in health care still is sorting through exactly what the final Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act rule means, and apparently the surveyors working for the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are no different.
-
If your institution is the lead story on the evening news, chances are good that it wont be for all the right reasons. Rather, youll find that the risk management department is suddenly faced with the challenge of saving the institutions reputation by saying the right thing in the right way.
-
Hospital security often suffers from complacency and poorly defined roles for the security staff, says a specialist who helps health care providers improve their programs. One of the best ways to improve your security is to make sure your officers arent misused as impromptu assistants for all manner of scut work, he says.
-
In addition to concentrating on the five conditions that lead to most ED malpractice claims, there are specific strategies you can employ to reduce the overall liability risk in that department, says Andrew S. Kaufman, JD, a partner with Kaufman, Borgeest & Ryan in New York City.
-
Risk managers often look at the emergency department as a little like a container of potato salad left out in the sun. Its a Petri dish for all the terrible things that can happen in your hospital, says one expert. That attitude has some basis in fact, she says, but there are specific actions you can take to reduce the risk.
-
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has published a revised survey instrument and proposed administration instructions for the patient perceptions of care survey known as HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Health Plans).
-
In outpatient surgery, a patients pain is treated immediately after surgery, and patients are sent home. However, the pain control after discharge may be more important than the initial treatment at the bedside, says Elaine A. Yellen, RN, PhD, assistant professor at Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi.
-
Its just gotten much easier for Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations surveyors to size up how your organization compares to others. The ORYX and core measure data are part of the Joint Commissions initiative to look at hospitals in a more uniform manner, so they can compare one hospital to another, explains Judy Homa-Lowry, RN, MS, CPHQ, president of Homa-Lowry Healthcare Consulting, based in Metamora, MI.
