Nursing management (Harrow, London, England : 1994)
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Nurs Manag (Harrow) · Feb 2015
ReviewDouble-checking high-risk medications in acute settings: a safer process.
There is a need to reduce medication errors, and one way of achieving this for high-risk medications is by double-checking. This article reports the results of a literature review, undertaken as part of an MSc, which examined safe processes for double-checking. ⋯ The review concluded that two people double-checking the entire process enhances and strengthens practice, and that clinical settings and contexts are important to safety in medication administration. The aim of the article is to provide evidence for nurse managers to support their decision making on safe administration practice in clinical settings.
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'Exit block' describes situations when hospital staff cannot move patients out of emergency departments (EDs) into inpatient beds. According to the College of Emergency Medicine, it affects around half a million patients a year. To help managers and clinicians reduce crowding in their EDs, the college has produced a guideline that explains the causes and consequences of crowding and suggests ways of reducing the effects and improving safety in EDs. Crowding in Emergency Departments can be accessed online at tinyurl.com/exit-block NHS England and Monitor have endorsed the resource in their winter planning guidance.
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NHS Education for Scotland has, in collaboration with the Scottish Patient Safety Programme, made the national early warning score (NEWS) and sepsis screening tool available as a smartphone app. The app provides: a NEWS calculator to alert clinicians to deteriorating patients and acute illness; a sepsis screening tool for the prompt recognition and initiation of treatment of patients with sepsis; an outline of the Sepsis 6 care bundle; and an algorithm to help identify organ dysfunction, severe sepsis, septic shock and when to escalate care. Go to tinyurl.com/sepsis-screening to download the app.
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USING AN EARLY warning score (EWS) system should improve the detection of acutely deteriorating patients. Under such a system, a score is allocated to each of six physiological measurements including respiratory rate and oxygen saturations, which are aggregated to produce an overall score. An aggregated score of seven or higher prompts nursing staff to refer a patient for emergency assessment.
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Knowledge translation is the means by which evidence-based practice is used in health care. Knowledge synthesis, a foundational element of knowledge translation, is a systematic, transparent, reproducible, efficient and scientific approach to identifying and summarising research findings for generalisable and consistent messages. ⋯ This article maps knowledge synthesis methods, by describing the specific stages, approaches and processes, and describes and compares different types of knowledge synthesis to help inform healthcare practitioners and policy makers about various designs. It also recommends a map of knowledge-synthesis designs for international agreement.