Do You Receive StayAlert! Notices in Your InBox?
Patient Safety Awareness Week was last week. Did you receive StayAlert! notices in your inbox? If not this is what you missed!
Monday March 14 – Patient Safety Hot Topic – Adverse Drug Events
According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) an adverse drug event (ADE) is harm experienced by a patient as a result of exposure to a medication. ADEs account for nearly 700,000 emergency department visits and 100,000 hospitalizations each year. ADEs affect nearly 5% of hospitalized patients, making them one of the most common types of inpatient errors.
Preventing Adverse Drug Events is a key goal of any comprehensive patient safety program. Strategies to prevent ADE’s should be implemented at each step along the pathway between a clinician’s decision to prescribe a medication and the patient actually receiving the medication…
Tuesday, March 15 – Patient Safety Hot Topic – Patient Falls
According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality there are between 700,000 and 1,000,000 people in the United States who fall in hospitals each year. Falls results in fractures, lacerations and internal bleeding causing prolonged hospital stays and increased costs.
Fall prevention involves managing a patient’s underlying fall risk factors and optimizing the hospital’s physical design and environment. Further, falls with serious injury are routinely among the top ten reported sentinel events. Best Practices to prevent patient falls in hospitals include…
Wednesday, March 16 – Patient Safety Hot Topic – Clostridium difficile
Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) is estimated to cause almost half a million infections in the United States each year. In 2011, approximately 83,000 of the patients who developed C. difficile experienced at least one recurrence and 29,000 died within 30 days of the initial diagnosis. Poor prescribing practices put patients at risk for C. difficile infections. More than half of all hospitalized patients will get an antibiotic at some point during their hospital stay, but studies have shown that 30-50% of antibiotics prescribed in hospitals are unnecessary or incorrect.
Preventing Clostridium difficile infections is a patient safety priority for hospitals and other healthcare settings. Best practices for preventing C. difficile infections include…
Thursday, March 17 – Patient Safety Hot Topic – Discharge Practices
According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the majority of adverse events that occur after hospital discharge are due to systemic problems in care transitions. A lack of continuity between inpatient and outpatient providers is common, and studies demonstrate that traditional communication systems like the dictated discharge summary generally do not contain essential information or fail to reach outpatient providers in a timely fashion. Inadequate medication reconciliation results in medication discrepancies or adverse drug events.
Ensuring safe care transitions is a fundamental patient safety issue. There are three areas that should be addressed during the discharge process…
Friday, March 18 – Patient Safety Hot Topic – Cybersecurity and Medical Devices
Medical devices, like other computer systems, can be vulnerable to security breaches, potentially impacting the safety and effectiveness of the device. This vulnerability intensifies as medical devices are increasingly connected to the internet, hospital networks, and to other medical devices. While the increased use of wireless technology and software in medical devices raises the risks of potential cybersecurity threats, these same features also improve health care and increase the ability of health care providers to treat patients and thus are important to the provision of patient care.
While medical device cybersecurity threats are a newer threat to patient safety, there are steps health care organizations can take to mitigate risks…
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