Editor's note: "Culture club" is a new Patient Safety Monitor Journal feature that focuses on how combining safety efforts creates a more effective overall culture of safety. This month, we take a look at how peer review can influence your culture of safety.
Conducting a timeout, including the use of a checklist, before beginning a surgery is a well-known requirement of The Joint Commission-it has been a standard of quality care for years now. Staff in operating rooms are used to systematically ticking off checklists, and just about...
By now, many in healthcare have learned from other industries that getting frontline staff input is essential to quality improvement. However, the task of obtaining that input has been a bit more challenging than many anticipated.
Patient satisfaction and quality of care matter to most frontline staff and other hospital employees, and they certainly matter in terms of reimbursement. The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey measures patient satisfaction in different ways...
Some healthcare-associated infection (HAI) rates have gone down in the past few years, according to the 2011 National and State Healthcare-Associated Infections Standardized Infection Ratio Report.
The Joint Commission has proposed a new National Patient Safety Goal (NPSG) for 2014 related to the management of alarms. Field review ended February 26.
In 2011, the 311-bed Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., was beginning to use its Packard Quality Management System as a methodology for improvement, empowering employees to identify and solve routine work problems, and design and implement better...
Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) recently developed a protocol to use a Web-based standardized clinical encounter to evaluate providers' ability to assess the risk of suicide.
Healthcare has come a long way in identifying safety issues-even the possibility of safety issues-but as many quality directors and frontline staff know, identifying is not solving.