“At one point, we didn’t know if we were going to be able to save the hospital,” says the facilities director.
It’s been one year since Hurricane Harvey struck Houston, flooding the city and displacing tens of thousands of people. In one week, the Category 4 storm dropped 61 inches of...
Every time patients are misidentified, they are put at risk. Sometimes the harm is minor: an unnecessary test or being placed in the wrong room. And sometimes the consequences are dire: getting the wrong medicine or having the wrong operation performed. There are numerous points where a mix-up...
The Joint Commission is the latest healthcare heavy-hitter to call for better protection of healthcare workers, announcing the creation of Sentinel Event Alert 59, which addresses violence—physical and verbal—against healthcare workers. About 75% of workplace assaults occur in the healthcare and...
There’s one facet of accreditation that every patient safety provider ought to know about: Immediate Jeopardy (IJ).
The CMS State Operations Manual defines Immediate Jeopardy as “a situation in which the provider’s noncompliance with one or more requirements of participation has...
Last October the hospital was placed under immediate jeopardy following the death of a patient with dementia. After being admitted from a nursing home, the patient was given 10 times the maximum daily dose of a calcium channel blocker, causing a fatal overdose.
This March, nursing supervisor Nancy Swift was shot to death in her office at UAB Highlands Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. Swift had been reprimanding a central sterile supply worker, Trevis Coleman, when he pulled out a gun and fired on her. Afterwards, Coleman killed himself, but not before...
There’s a case where a World War II POW committed suicide by hitting himself in the head with an empty metal canteen after days without water. While that happened in the hold of a Japanese prison boat, not a hospital, it highlights how resourceful a suicidal person can be when it comes to...
With the end of the opioid/painkiller crisis nowhere in sight, it’s up to providers and facilities to lead the charge.
More than three dozen bills addressing various concerns about the opioid epidemic are before committees in the Senate and House. The Centers for Disease Control and...
Sepsis mortality rates increase quickly when left untreated, even if it’s only for a few hours. The difficulty facing providers is that there isn’t a simple test for sepsis. Instead, they have to watch for patterns and symptoms that could indicate sepsis. As a result, it’s common to have...
This March, a team of experts working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a study on antibiotic prescription habits in outpatient facilities. The study, which appeared in the Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology journal, showed that there are...
