In just about every hospital, there is at least one person devoted to keeping patients safe from medication errors every step of the way: storing and labeling look-alike/sound-alike drugs properly, ensuring nurses hand off patients with a chance to ask questions, teaching the...
A transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) procedure replaces a patient's diseased aortic valve through a delivery device introduced in the groin. The procedure is often used for patients too sick or weak for traditional open-heart surgery. However, TAVR is fairly new and...
Editor's note: "Culture club" is a new Patient Safety Monitor Journal feature that focuses on how combining safety efforts creates a more effective overall culture of safety. This month, we take a look at how peer review can influence your culture of safety.
Conducting a timeout, including the use of a checklist, before beginning a surgery is a well-known requirement of The Joint Commission-it has been a standard of quality care for years now. Staff in operating rooms are used to systematically ticking off checklists, and just about...
By now, many in healthcare have learned from other industries that getting frontline staff input is essential to quality improvement. However, the task of obtaining that input has been a bit more challenging than many anticipated.
Patient satisfaction and quality of care matter to most frontline staff and other hospital employees, and they certainly matter in terms of reimbursement. The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey measures patient satisfaction in different ways...
Some healthcare-associated infection (HAI) rates have gone down in the past few years, according to the 2011 National and State Healthcare-Associated Infections Standardized Infection Ratio Report.
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.
