The Joint Commission (TJC) announced revisions to its anticoagulant therapy National Patient Safety Goal (NPSG) December 7. NPSG 03.05.01 has eight new or revised elements of performance (EP).
Consult your emergency management plan when facing an impending storm, and update this plan with lessons learned after each storm to avoid grappling with problems that may already have solutions. This is just one of the lessons reinforced for hospitals that were impacted by Winter Storm Jonas (...
Tell your nurses that soon that packaging for a patient’s nicotine patch, gum, or lozenge might go straight into the regular trash — as long as it is FDA-approved as an over-the-counter nicotine replacement therapy.
And your state must sign off on the exemption of the packaging as...
Last November, the innocently named Camp Fire killed over 80 people in California, making it the deadliest wildfire in the state’s history. The fire destroyed 10,500 homes, filled the air with smoke for miles around, and burned an area the size of Chicago. The fire was just one of 6,228 that...
You can modify the Triage by Resource Allocation for IN-patient (TRAIN) matrix to suit your facility’s needs in case of a mass evacuation. Hospitals across California and other areas, including the Sharp HealthCare system in San Diego, have modified the matrix for use as part of their all-...
It’s not news to most providers that suicide and drug abuse are on the rise. However, a trio of reports from the CDC have shed light on the extent of the problem.
In 2017, American life expectancy dropped for the third year in a row, with the main culprits of the decline being drug...
In December, the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA) issued new guidance for preventing infections associated with anesthesiology procedures and equipment in the operating room (OR). Published in SHEA’s journal Infection Control & Healthcare Epidemiology, the guidance...
Drawing information from patients can help boost understanding of why diagnostic errors happen and reduce the risk of future errors, according to new research. Diagnostic errors are a serious patient safety problem, impacting about 12 million adult outpatients each year and causing as many as 17...
It is an understatement to say 2018 was an eventful year. If you need to review anything, we’ve made this index of PSMJ articles to help you quickly find what you need.
We look forward to keeping you abreast of the patient safety field in 2019!
The ECRI Institute published its annual list of the top 10 health technology hazards facing healthcare in 2019. Longtime readers will recognize several hazards from ECRI’s 2018 and 2017 lists, such as cybersecurity and mattresses oozing body fluids.
