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The newly released 2005 National Patient Safety Goals indicate that the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) will put special emphasis on efforts to reduce patient falls, infections, and misidentification of patients.
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Here is what you need to know about the class action lawsuits filed against some of the largest nonprofit hospitals in the United States.
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This case reinforces the basic notion that all health care providers have a responsibility to assure that their patients are receiving appropriate care in a timely manner.
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Are you comfortable talking about return on investment? How about loss run analysis? Those business concepts may sound like someone elses job. But if you talk the language of the hospitals financial officers, you may win unprecedented support for your ergonomics program.
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A phlebotomist developed active TB and 56 employees tested positive for latent TB infection after a highly infectious patient spent three weeks on general medical wards before being placed in a negative pressure room.
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The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced an initiative to emphasize hazard communication, an area that already is a routine part of inspections. Every inspection even those focused on a specific complaint includes a review of hazard communication and record keeping.
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Studies have associated workplace exposures to hazardous drugs with health effects such as skin rashes and adverse reproductive events (including infertility, spontaneous abortions, or congenital malformations) and possibly leukemia and other cancers.
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Nurses who prepare and administer chemotherapy agents in outpatient settings often dont use the proper gloves or other recommended personal protective equipment (PPE), according to a survey of oncology nurses. Furthermore, few nurses who handle chemotherapeutic drugs received health evaluations that included reproductive and cancer evaluation, the survey found.
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Current work practices are not adequate to protect health care workers from chemotherapeutic agents and other dangerous drugs, and hospitals need to be more vigilant in their efforts to prevent exposure, according to a hazard alert from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).
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Same-day surgery managers were apprehensive about periodic performance reviews (PPRs) by the Joint Commission. However, the response has been so positive to the self-evaluation required at the midpoint of an accreditation cycle that the Joint Commission will make the PPR an annual requirement beginning in 2006.
