Despite sustained attention from hospital leaders, wait times in the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) ED were considerably longer than desired. Knowing that longer wait times means poor patient satisfaction and a higher risk of poor health outcomes, a team of resident physicians...
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has released its most recent Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture: 2012 User Comparative Database Report, which includes responses from 1,128 hospitals and 567,703 hospital staff, 76% of whom have direct interaction with patients...
The Joint Commission requires healthcare facilities to train employees annually. Part of that training includes best practices for infection control (IC), but effective training requires infection preventionists (IP) to employ training methods based on evidence-based best practices that yield...
Years ago, when I wanted information on certain patient safety subjects, I might have gone to multiple sources—the Internet (of course), a colleague within my network, and maybe even a book.
The National Quality Forum (NQF) recently endorsed two outcomes-based measures from the American College of Surgeons (ACS) National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP). The measures, surgical site infections (SSI) and urinary tract infections (UTI), were created in partnership with CMS...
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced the arrival of "Get Smart About Antibiotics Week" (observed November 14-20, 2011) by launching a new antibiotic tracking system that will allow hospitals to monitor antibiotic usage and compare themselves to other hospitals in the...
Determining and agreeing on how many hours per patient day (HPPD) it takes to care for your patient population is a challenging aspect of our work as nurse leaders. HPPD is not the total number of staff needed on the unit, but a...
There are some days when the field of patient safety gets a little down on itself about the slow pace of change in the past couple of decades. However, credence should be given to the specialized field and industry it has...
The National Quality Forum (NQF) has released an updated list of its Serious Reportable Events (SRE) in a new report, Serious Reportable Events In Healthcare-2011 Update: A Consensus.
