The role of a health equity officer (HEO) is to steward equity in a healthcare facility and ensure care quality regardless of a patient’s ethnicity, wealth, sexuality, or age.
Suicide prevention, hand hygiene, medication safety, and patient identification are all on The Joint Commission’s list of National Patient Safety Goals (NPSG) for 2025. NPSGs were designed to target identified patient safety issues of significant concern and to reduce that risk through process...
Viral hemorrhagic fevers (VHF), such as Ebola virus disease and Marburg virus disease, represent an ongoing threat even if their chance of occurrence on U.S. soil may seem low. These highly infectious diseases not only carry a high mortality rate but also present unique challenges for hospital...
CMS frequently uncovers common compliance issues during inspections of ambulatory surgery centers (ASC). These deficiencies involve lapses in infection control, patient safety concerns, and failures to fully adhere to CMS regulations.
The year draws to a close and it’s time for healthcare providers to look back at all the patient safety stories and topics we’ve covered this year. After all, many patient safety issues from 2024 will cross over with us into 2025.
Security budgets, though critical for safeguarding patients, staff, and visitors, aren’t immune to cuts. Drew Neckar, a security consultant with COSECURE Enterprise Risk Solutions, caught up with HSL for some insights on how hospital security leaders can make...
When changes to your healthcare organization occur, your emergency management plan might have to change with it. The last thing you want if a fire or active shooter event happens is to open your emergency plan and find out that the person in charge of a crucial element has retired and their role...
When the Stress, Trauma, and Resilience (STAR) program at Ohio State’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health set out to find the best ways and timing to reach out to those who have experienced a traumatic event, it discovered that victims weren’t the only ones in need of support....
When there isn’t an immediate consequence to an unsafe behavior, in the laboratory or elsewhere, people can easily mistake “nothing bad happened” with “nothing bad will ever happen.” This leads to normalized deviance, where laboratory safety policies and standard operating procedures (SOP) are...
This is Part 2 of our interview with Patricia McGaffigan, RN, MS, CPPS, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)’s senior advisor and president of the Certification Board of Professionals in Patient Safety. PSMJ spoke with McGaffigan about the Certified...
