When assessing the needs of each patient, don’t forget to ask about religious requirements, including patients who are seeking care virtually or engaging in education through hospital-provided tablets or other devices.
Ensuring you have competent physicians who are providing high-quality care is essential to the success of any healthcare organization. To evaluate physician care, hospitals and medical staffs have spent years developing their peer review processes. CMS and other major accreditors all require...
As CMS begins focusing more on emergency preparedness planning, review your hospital’s plans to ensure they include how the facility will handle a patient surge during civic unrest. Preparation for civic unrest unfortunately must be a part of any medical facility’s emergency planning, say...
Recently, the good folks at ECRI revealed their report on the Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for 2024. I don’t know that anyone would be surprised at what made the list, though I am surprised that one consideration did not show up (more on that in a moment).
You don’t give the same dose of medication to every patient, and the same is true with training healthcare staff, says Robert Lloyd, PhD, a vice president of improvement science and senior improvement advisor at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). This is the idea behind the dosing...
Thea Rosenbaum, MD, MBA, is the chief clinical transformation officer at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) and has experience in breaking the rules—in a good way. As a member of the Breaking the Rules (BTR) coalition, UAMS asked their healthcare staff in 2015, 2018, and 2022...
One of the many lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic is that medical gas system capacity is an important consideration. I suspect a lot of folks are giving serious consideration to how best to shore up (and build upon) existing oxygen capacity, in the event that there is another...
In 2022, the Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario embarked on a journey to prune away the rules that hindered care and comfort in their Department of Emergency Medicine. The project was lead by Louise Rang, MD, FRCPC, RDMS, who attributed their success to a fantastic team and a budget line...
If you could break any rule in service of a better experience for patients or healthcare staff, what would it be? What rules create complexity and effort for doctors, nurses, and patients without improving safety, efficiency, or comfort? And what’s stopping you from ditching those rules?
Urinary tract infections are one of the most common healthcare-associated infections. Urinary catheters are also one of the most common medical devices experienced by adult patients in hospitals and emergency rooms worldwide. A catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI) occurs when...
