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Hospitals might improve their ethics consultation processes if they design and use a brief ethics family assessment tool to determine families' and patients' values, two ethicists say.
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Hospital ethics boards seeking a solution for efficiently and effectively documenting and assessing ethics consultation work could find a best practice in the ethics consultation web (ECWeb) program developed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in Washington, DC, experts say.
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President Obama's administration reversed its decision to revise a Medicare regulation to include paying physicians to discuss good advance care planning with patients.
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Hospital ethics committees could clarify and improve the way they handle issues involving life support in the intensive care unit (ICU) if they brought more nuance to any definition of the word "futile," an expert says.
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Caffeine. You know how you feel when you are one cup of coffee over the line? Everything is jumbled and irritating, and you just want to lash out at someone! What an uncomfortable feeling that is, for you and for those around you (as I have been told...). We see it with the surgeons, staff, anesthesia, front desk staff seemingly everyone is wired just a bit too tight.
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More health care workers responded to this season's push for influenza vaccination by rolling up their sleeves and getting the vaccine. By mid-November, 56% reported having gotten the vaccine and 7% said they definitely planned to get the vaccine, according to a web-based survey conducted for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 68% of hospital employees had received the vaccine, and another 5% said they definitely intended to be vaccinated, for a total of 73%.
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Many ambulatory surgery programs are accustomed to using a specific size of vials for hydromorphone, but they have been forced by what is being described as the worst drug shortage ever to convert to vials twice the normal size due to a shortage of their customary vials.
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Some health care facilities are finding that video cameras inside and outside the facility are allowing them to reduce crime and maintain security staffing even as the facility grows.
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Six new reports issued by the AAAHC Institute for Quality Improvement (AAAHC Institute), a not-for-profit subsidiary of the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC), offer insights to enhance the quality and efficiency of some of the most common outpatient procedures.
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Researchers report that, compared with conventional sedation, balanced propofol sedation (BPS) using propofol with midazolam and meperidine provided higher provider satisfaction, better patient cooperation, and similar adverse event profiles in patients undergoing therapeutic endoscopic procedures.
