In 2009, The Joint Commission added Leadership standard LD.03.01.01, "Leaders create and maintain a culture of safety and quality throughout the hospital," to recognize that behavior that intimidates others and affects staff morale and turnover can also be damaging to patient...
It was a simple mistake she's still ashamed she made, but luckily when Elizabeth Butler, BA, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Massachusetts, took the stitches out of the wrong woman, the patient was not severely injured. Although Butler has followed up with the...
It was a simple mistake she's still ashamed she made, but luckily when Elizabeth Butler, BA, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Massachusetts, took the stitches out of the wrong woman, the patient was not severely injured. Although Butler has followed up with the...
Editor's note: Columnist Catherine Hinz, MHA, works as a leader in patient safety at HealthEast Care System in St. Paul, Minn. Previously, she worked at PatientSafe Solutions, Inc., and has completed a patient safety internship with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality...
Despite already being below the national average on patient falls, Lallie Kemp Regional Medical Center's staff and leadership still felt falls were happening too often. The small but busy 25-bed critical access hospital pulled together to implement many tried-and-true methods, and in the process...
Q: During our recent survey, the surveyor cited three instances where the preprocedure H&P was missing elements based on the medical staff rule requirements. How can I clarify this?
The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare released a new Hand-off Communications Targeted Solutions Tool™ (TST) to help health care organizations with the process of passing patient information between caregivers to prevent miscommunication-related errors.
You can have the best policies and procedures in the world, but if communication and understanding by those who need to know is not available, the intent of the patient rights chapter will never come to fruition. The chapter captain assigned to patients’ rights, with guidance from the...
In today's world of healthcare, hospitals have to measure nearly everything related to quality and patient safety. There are lots of metrics, many tied to reimbursement. Some are very specific, and some are reported to multiple outside agencies. There is no doubt that hospitals...
High-touch surface areas remain a constant concern for infection preventionists (IP). Regular and terminal cleaning can only be done so many times a day, and surfaces like bed rails, doorknobs, and call buttons are constantly harboring infectious organisms.
