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.
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.
In 2010, staff at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Mass., started to become interested in new UV light technology as a possibility to help reduce infections. Although the hospital had lower than average infection rates, infection control staff were having trouble...
It's time again for the annual Patient Safety Awareness Week (PSAW), an annual education and awareness campaign for healthcare safety led by the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) that began in 2002.
Mistakes happen. Many times when mistakes happen in hospitals, the hospital's system and process design has at least in part failed a frontline provider. How much of a human error is truly the fault of the hospital could probably be under debate well after the incident. However...
All day and all night, healthcare providers try to help people heal and feel better. They take care of sick patients, both the chronic and acutely ill. Much of the care-and the outcomes that follow-is routine for providers.
