Journal of patient safety
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Journal of patient safety · Dec 2020
Essential and Nonessential Blood Testing in the Clinical Teaching Unit.
The aim of the study was to evaluate the essential and nonessential blood tests ordered on the internal medicine clinical teaching units (CTUs) at Kingston General Hospital. Our aim was to establish a baseline performance measure identifying appropriate use of laboratory tests that could be used to inform improvement over time. ⋯ Inadequate use of blood tests for CTU patients is common. Quality improvement initiatives should aim to address the lack of observed consensus between attending physicians' views and the ordered tests and to streamline decision-making and the ordering/communication processes. Clinical standards and guidelines regarding ordering of laboratory tests should be clearly defined.
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Journal of patient safety · Dec 2020
The Detection, Analysis, and Significance of Physician Clustering in Medical Malpractice Lawsuit Payouts.
There is evidence that most adverse events result from individual errors and that most malpractice suits with payouts reflect both patient injury and error. ⋯ There is a clustering of payments in medical malpractice cases among a small group of physicians. These findings point up the need to oppose the negative impact of such outlier physicians on the safety of patients.
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Journal of patient safety · Dec 2020
Description and Yield of Current Quality and Safety Review in Selected US Academic Emergency Departments.
Quality and safety review for performance improvement is important for systems of care and is required for US academic emergency departments (EDs). Assessment of the impact of patient safety initiatives in the context of increasing burdens of quality measurement compels standardized, meaningful, high-yield approaches for performance review. Limited data describe how quality and safety reviews are currently conducted and how well they perform in detecting patient harm and areas for improvement. We hypothesized that decades-old approaches used in many academic EDs are inefficient and low yield for identifying patient harm. ⋯ With an overall adverse event rate of 1.99%, commonly used referral sources seem to be low yield and inefficient for detecting patient harm. Approximately 6% of the cases identified by these criteria yielded a near miss or quality concern. New approaches to quality and safety review in the ED are needed to optimize their yield and efficiency for identifying harm and areas for improvement.
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Journal of patient safety · Sep 2020
Impact of Teamwork and Communication Training Interventions on Safety Culture and Patient Safety in Emergency Departments: A Systematic Review.
This study aimed to narratively summarize the literature reporting on the effect of teamwork and communication training interventions on culture and patient safety in emergency department (ED) settings. ⋯ Overall, teamwork and communication training interventions improve the safety culture in ED settings and may positively affect patient outcome. The implementation of safety culture programs may be considered to reduce incidence of medical errors and adverse events.