Until 2007, nurses at Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis relied on traditional shift change reporting methods to communicate patient care information from caregiver to caregiver. But when challenged by Riley’s leadership team to find ways to improve hospital documentation, the Clinical...
Briefings on Accreditation & Quality - Volume 21, Issue 8
Systemic change does require visionary leadership. The board of trustees for our facility established a new three-year strategic plan based on our six indicators of success. One such indicator is Quality & Patient Safety, and the board determined that this indicator should include a vision “...
Q. We are in the process of moving to an electronic system. How have other hospitals managed co-signatures on high-risk medications when nurses are scanning meds and patient IDs at the bedside? We would like to make it as easy as possible for the nurses.
Editor’s note: The following column explores patient safety from the perspective of a newcomer to the field. Columnist Catherine Hinz, MHA, is the patient safety lead at HealthEast Care System in St. Paul, MN. Previously, Hinz worked for seven years as...
Briefings on Accreditation & Quality - Volume 21, Issue 7
Facilities across the country struggle daily with the challenges inherent to the use of restraints. For Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) at Midwestern Regional Medical Center, the decision was made in 2005 to deal with restraints by simply going restraint free.
If your hospital is lucky enough to be within the borders of the state of Maryland, you can participate in the Maryland Patient Safety Center’s (MPSC) SAFE from FALLS initiative. The project, based on a program by the same name being run through the Minnesota Hospital Association, has been...
True or false: It is important to ensure that we provide information to our patients in a manner in which they can understand. This may include the use of translation or interpretive services, as well as ensuring that the information is in a format at a grade level and in a language...
