“First, do no harm” is a simple, often-quoted phrase adopted by healthcare organizations dedicated to patient safety. These organizations would do well to establish effective hand hygiene initiatives aided by automated technology as an important step toward creating safety cultures. Taking every precaution to prevent harm starts quite logically with hand hygiene, which has been […]
A Perfect Match: Safety Culture and Technology Read More »
Patient Safety’s Impact on Hospital Margings A patient at risk for a fall attempted to walk to the bathroom on his own, after waiting a long time for a nurse to respond to a call light. He fell backwards, hit his head, and sustained a traumatic brain injury due to this patient safety lapse. Not
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Hospital patients depend on their care team to make sure they get well – it’s that simple. Part of that healing process includes purposeful rounding – “a proactive, systematic, nurse-driven, evidence-based intervention that helps (us) anticipate and address patient needs,” according to “The Value of Purposeful Rounding,” an article in American Nurse Today, the official
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Every healthcare executive dealing with patient safety challenges must deal with the realities of organizational culture, the philosophy of stakeholders in the organization in regard to patient safety, and budget. Many find themselves facing a daunting task with command of too few resources to attack the well-known but poorly documented problem of healthcare-acquired infections and
Improving Patient Safety: 5 Steps to Organizational Buy-In Read More »
Flu season brings a set of challenges each year—challenges further amplified when an outbreak occurs in a healthcare setting. From increased morbidity and mortality to longer lengths of stay and higher care costs, healthcare-associated influenza can place a huge burden on patients and healthcare providers alike. With this in mind, prevention is the ultimate weapon
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We are living in an age of Big Data. Thousands of terabytes of information have been collected on everything from internet behavior to RNA transcripts, spurred by the successful development of tools capable of analyzing massive amounts of information. Now, medical data—datasets from electronic health records and other sources—are joining the club. How might data
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Key Tips for Joint Commission Hygiene Standards As of January 1, 2018, if a Joint Commission surveyor sees just one clinician fail to clean his or her hands while in the process of direct patient care, the hospital will be cited with a deficiency, resulting in a Requirement for Improvement under the Infection Prevention and
Joint Commission’s New Hand Hygiene Standards: Key Compliance Tips Read More »
C. difficile, Hospital-Acquired Infection #1 C. difficile infection (CDI) is among the most serious of nosocomial infections, affecting nearly half a million Americans each year. The leading cause of hospital-acquired diarrheal infection, C. difficile spreads via spores that are highly resistant to physical and biochemical cleaning agents. Approximately 75 percent of CDI cases are acquired
Understanding C. diff and Its New Hand Hygiene Guidelines Read More »
“We were really hoping it wasn’t here yet, to be honest with you,” Tom Chiller, MD, MPHTM, chief of the Mycotic Diseases Branch at the CDC, said in an interview with CIDRAP. “This is definitely a hospital-transmitted organism.” The Center for Disease Control has outlined three main reasons for the increased concern: They also suggest a
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Children are better behaved when their parents are watching them, but social science suggests that this tendency to modify behavior when under observation does not disappear with age. It is known as the Hawthorne (or observer) Effect, and it can spell trouble for healthcare providers if they ignore the impact of this phenomenon on
How the Hawthorne Effect Impacts Hand Hygiene Compliance Read More »
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