American journal of medical quality : the official journal of the American College of Medical Quality
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Radial arterial line placement is an invasive procedure that may result in complications. Validated checklists are central to teaching and assessing procedural skills and may result in improved health care quality. The results of the first step of the validation of a radial arterial line placement checklist are described. ⋯ The internal consistency coefficient using Cronbach α was .99. Developing a 22-item checklist for teaching and assessing radial arterial line placement is the first step in the validation process. For this checklist to become further validated, it should be implemented and studied in the simulation and clinical environments.
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In spite of efforts to improve patient safety since the 1999 report, To Error Is Human, recent studies have shown limited progress toward preventing serious error. Most hospitals use root cause analysis as a method of serious event investigation. ⋯ This method resolves the 4 deficiencies noted above. The authors' experience investigating 105 serious events over 2 years is described.
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Long waits for appointments decrease patient satisfaction. Administrative wait-time measures are used by managers, but relationships between these measures and satisfaction have not been studied. Data from the Veterans Health Administration are used to examine the relationship between wait times and satisfaction. ⋯ Logistic regression models predict patient satisfaction using these measures. The new-patient capacity, new-patient time stamp measures using CD, and the returning-patient desired-date prospective measure were significantly associated with patient satisfaction. Standard practices can be improved by targeting wait-time measures to patient subpopulations.