Journal of patient safety
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Journal of patient safety · Mar 2010
Check a Box. Save a Life: How student leadership is shaking up health care and driving a revolution in patient safety.
The objective was to engage health professions students as leaders in spreading the World Health Organization Surgical Checklist. The published impact of the checklist in reducing surgical complications and deaths, combined with its ease of use, offers an ideal target for students to save lives and prevent suffering. As members of the "Check a Box. Save a Life." campaign, students can speed the pace of patient safety improvement. ⋯ As an independent, self-organized, decentralized effort and an application of student social organizing to the cause of patient safety, "Check a Box." is a landmark achievement. Leveraging social media and disrupting the traditional model of safety leadership, the campaign offers hope for the future of patient safety.
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Journal of patient safety · Mar 2010
The impact of integrative medicine on pain management in a tertiary care hospital.
Optimal inpatient pain management remains a major institutional and therapeutic challenge. Nontoxic, nonpharmacological approaches to treating pain show promise but have not been widely implemented, nor has their effectiveness been evaluated. ⋯ The formal provision of inpatient integrative medicine had a significant impact on pain scores for hospitalized patients, reducing self-reported pain by more than 50%, without placing patients at increased risk of adverse effects. This was true in all 6 settings. Age, previous use of complementary therapies, and sex did not affect results. Future research must define the appropriate dose of the intervention, the duration of the relief, and the identification of patients most likely to respond to these nonpharmacological treatments. Additionally, future research using the electronic health record will allow quantification of any reduction in total costs, pain medication usage, and adverse events.
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Journal of patient safety · Dec 2009
Admission handoff communications: clinician's shared understanding of patient severity of illness and problems.
Communication errors are a leading cause of medical mistakes. Handoff communications during the admission of a patient are a critical point of communication during which patient care is transferred from one clinician to another. The transmission of the patient's current severity of illness and active problems is integral to this communication. Our objective was to determine if this information is conveyed by the current handoff process between resident physicians. ⋯ We conclude that information needed to assess the patient's severity of illness and problems may have been present in the handoff communications but may not have been fully received and integrated by the residents. In addition, attending physicians may have an additional capacity to "infer" information, perhaps because of prior clinical experience or expertise. This study implies that residents may need more formal education, training, and evaluation of their handoffs to improve patient safety.
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Journal of patient safety · Sep 2009
Nurse-physician communication in the long-term care setting: perceived barriers and impact on patient safety.
Clear and complete communication between health care providers is a prerequisite for safe patient management and is a major priority of the Joint Commission's 2008 National Patient Safety Goals. The goal of this study was to describe nurses' perceptions of nurse-physician communication in the long-term care (LTC) setting. ⋯ A combination of nurse and physician behaviors contributes to ineffective communication in the LTC setting. These findings have important implications for patient safety and support the development of structured communication interventions to improve quality of nurse-physician communication.
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Journal of patient safety · Sep 2009
Using in situ simulation to identify and resolve latent environmental threats to patient safety: case study involving a labor and delivery ward.
Since the publication of To Err is Human, health care professionals have looked to high-reliability industries such as commercial aviation for guidance on improving system safety. One of the most widely adopted aviation-derived approaches is simulation-based team training, also known as crew resource management (CRM) training. In the health care domain, CRM training often takes place in custom-built simulation laboratories that are designed to replicate operating rooms or labor and delivery rooms. ⋯ During the simulation, a number of latent environmental threats to safety were identified. The following article presents not only the latent threats but also the steps that the hospital has taken to remedy them. Results from clinical simulations in operational health care settings can help identify and resolve latent environmental threats to patient safety.