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The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) has posed liability risks for hospitals for many years, but EMTALA obligations have been limited mainly to the emergency department (ED). Now a recent decision by a federal district court in Texas suggests that the law could be applied much more broadly to inpatients as well.
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In response to news about a possible program that would encourage patients to report medical errors, eight U.S. congressmen wrote to Carolyn Clancy, MD, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, to express their concerns.
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Under the plan proposed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), patients and their relatives would report medical errors and near misses through a web site and in telephone interviews.
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News: A woman prematurely gave birth to an infant in 2002. The womans labor was induced, and she experienced a prolonged vaginal birth. The fetus was under distress during delivery.
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News: The patient was a 45-year-old woman who had been experiencing chest discomfort. Her primary care physician told her to obtain a complete heart check-up at the hospital.
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When Jill Matzat was monitoring clinical studies, she approached it the way she had approached her work in the lab and as a nurse.
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IRBs continue to see informed consent (IC) forms that require high school or college reading skills when nearly half of Americans can read no higher than a 5th grade level, an IRB chair says.
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IRBs have full schedules, and the little mistakes investigators make when applying for an approval can bog down the process, adding weeks and resulting in wasted time. As one IRB office has discovered, a solution that can reduce turnaround time and improve efficiency involves the use of a pre-review screening process.
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Many researchers have stories about the challenges of getting reviews from multiple IRBs for a study the differing standards, varying risk assessments and the duplicated paperwork.
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One of the key attributes of a strong human research protection program is an institution's ability to optimize its resources, an expert says.
