Laboratories are a unique environment from an OSHA training standpoint. They include complex chemical and biological materials, potentially harmful equipment, and large numbers of staff.
Traditionally, residency is seen as a gauntlet through which physicians in training must pass to become competent, independent practitioners. Long hours, sleep deprivation, taxing and emotional patient care, constant supervision, and the transformation of theoretical knowledge into practice...
Healthcare-acquired infections (HAI) remain a major threat to patient safety despite the best efforts of healthcare workers everywhere. Carmen Duke, MPH, CIC, an infection prevention contractor in the Greater Chattanooga area, discusses what leads to HAIs and some of the most...
Fire detection in healthcare is rarely about whether a hospital has a system in place. It’s about whether that system supports real-world decision-making under pressure—for staff who cannot evacuate patients quickly and for first responders entering complex, occupied buildings with incomplete...
First discovered in the 1970s, Legionella bacterium is responsible for legionellosis: a respiratory disease that can cause a type of pneumonia called legionnaires’ disease, which kills about a quarter of the people who contract it.
For hospital accreditation and quality leaders, patient safety and quality improvement are often described as inseparable. In reality, they frequently operate as parallel functions—adjacent on paper but disconnected in execution.
In this guest column, Dan Scungio, MT(ASCP), SLS, laboratory safety officer for multihospital system Sentara Healthcare in Virginia, and otherwise known as “Dan, the Lab Safety Man,” discusses the important issues that affect your job every day. Today he talks about ventilation in...
Hospitals must report adverse actions taken against the privileges of a physician or dentist to the National Practitioner Data Bank. Hospitals must report any action affecting a physician’s privileges for more than 30 days.
As workplace violence continues to rise, hospitals are discovering that some of their most serious security gaps are not rooted in staffing or policy. Instead, they may come down to life safety systems that were designed decades ago.
A systematic review found that preventable medication harm occurs in about 3% of patients across care settings, with more than a quarter of that harm classified as severe or potentially life-threatening.
