Anticoagulant drugs remain one of the top safety concerns for hospitals around the country, and government agencies and medication safety organizations continue to devote time and energy to make anticoagulant oversight a priority for healthcare organizations.
Between hand hygiene, sterile practices, environmental cleaning, and a host of other infection control best practices, the healthcare industry has come a long way in taking precautions to prevent patient infections. But according to the CDC, approximately 1.7 million healthcare-...
When the Institute of Medicine's report To Err Is Human was released in 1999, there was a clear shift in the patient safety world. Previously, clinicians absorbed the brunt of the blame when it came to medical errors. The report shed new light on the medical industry and...
The Joint Commission has proposed a new National Patient Safety Goal (NPSG) for 2014 related to the management of alarms. Field review ended February 26.
In 2011, the 311-bed Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., was beginning to use its Packard Quality Management System as a methodology for improvement, empowering employees to identify and solve routine work problems, and design and implement better...
Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) recently developed a protocol to use a Web-based standardized clinical encounter to evaluate providers' ability to assess the risk of suicide.
Healthcare has come a long way in identifying safety issues-even the possibility of safety issues-but as many quality directors and frontline staff know, identifying is not solving.
