Journal of intensive care medicine
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Poor communication among health-care providers is cited as the most common cause of sentinel events involving patients. Patient care in the critical care setting is incredibly complex. A consistent care plan is necessary between day/night shift teams and among bedside intensive care unit (ICU) nurses, consultants, and physicians. Our goal was to create a novel, easily accessible communication device to improve ICU patient care. ⋯ Our glass door patient handover tool is an easily adaptable intervention that has improved communication leading to an overall decrease in the number of handover communication errors.
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In our academic intensive care unit (ICU), there is excess ordering of routine laboratory tests. This is partially due to a lack of transparency of laboratory-processing costs and to the admission order plans that favor daily laboratory test orders. We hypothesized that a program that involves physician and staff education and alters the current ICU order sets will lead to a sustained decrease in routine laboratory test ordering. ⋯ A simple technique of resident, nursing, and ancillary staff education, combined with alterations in order sets using electronic medical records, can lead to a sustained reduction in laboratory test utilization over time and to significant cost savings without affecting patient safety.
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J Intensive Care Med · Sep 2017
Impact of a Multidisciplinary Bundle on Time to Antibiotic Administration in Septic SICU Patients.
The goal of this study was to investigate barriers to timely antibiotic administration in septic surgical intensive care unit (SICU) patients and examine the impact of a multidisciplinary bundle on the time from prescription to antibiotic administration. ⋯ We achieved a higher rate of timely antibiotic administration among septic SICU patients by implementing process changes based on barriers identified by the nurses.