Patient safety measure

Concentrated electrolytes (potassium chloride, potassium phosphate, and sodium chloride greater than 0.9%) should not be stored in patient care areas as a patient safety measure. Serum magnesium levels do not correlate well with total body magnesium stores. For this reason, magnesium supplementation is often given empirically to critically ill patients. 

All health care personnel should be strongly encouraged to receive the influenza vaccine yearly in order to prevent transmission of influenza within the health care facility and to decrease employee absenteeism for influenza-related reasons. The vaccine should be made available to employees at the workplace, free of charge. Employees should be asked to sign a declination if refusing to receive the influenza vaccine. Additionally, health care facilities should report the number of health care personnel receiving influenza vaccine as a patient safety measure.19... 

Glance, L. G., Li, Y., Osier, T. M., Mukamel, D. B., Dick, A, W., Impact of Date Stamping on Patient Safety Measurement in Patients Undergoing CABG Experience with the AHRQ Patient Safety Indicators, BMC Heath Research, Vol. 8, 2008, pp. 176-182. 

Medical errors—Prevention. 2. Health services administrators. 3. Patients—Safety measures. 1. Hidley, John H. II. Title. 

PREVENT ING IN JU RY. After administration of a hypnotic, the nurse raises the side rails and advises the patient to remain in bed and to call for assistance if it is necessary to get out of bed. Fhtients receiving sedative doses may or may not require this safety measure depending on the patient s response to the drug. The nurse assesses the... 

The administration of 131I requires safety measurements to reduce to a minimum the irradiation of medical personnel and to avoid contamination of rooms and relatives of patients. Capsules containing 131I are therefore to be preferred to liquid iodine. At doses above 25 mCi (555 MBq), usually intended only for treatment of patients with thyroid cancer, isolation in a specially constructed room of a service for nuclear medicine is necessary. Waste disposal should also be carefully managed so as to avoid overall contamination (5,6). 

Lovern E. 2001. Minding hospitals business Purchasing coalition pushes hospitals to improve patient safety through process measures, but industry says standards are too expensive. Mod Healthcare 31 30. 

ANVISA is a federal organization linked to Brazil s Health Ministry, which has the incumbency of looking after medication quality and other health products aimed at patients safety. Several documents regarding GMP and quality control are easily accessed. The agency is also responsible for establishing enforcing the rules and can take corrective measures and punish the offenders [46],... 

The combination of clozapine and lithium has been studied in a randomized controlled trial in 10 patients with schizophrenia and 10 with a schizoaffective disorder taking clozapine with either lithium or placebo for 4 weeks (299). The combination was well tolerated, except for reversible neurotoxic reactions in two patients with schizophrenia, and safety measures showed no significant variations. The authors concluded that the lithium added to clozapine appears to afford potential benefit in schizoaffective disorders without harmful effects for schizophrenia, however, it did not afford improvement but posed a risk of lithium toxicity. 

Quality me a.t are merit and improvement requires developing and testing quality measures and investigating the best ways to collect, compare, and communicate these data so they are useful to decision makers. AHRQ s research emphasizes studies of the most effective ways to implement these measures and strategies in order to improve patient safety and healthcare quality. 

Since the late 1970s, many studies have been published that document the success of pharmacists management of specific types of patients, drugs, disease states, and specific patient problems and issues. Outcomes measured have included increased patient safety and satisfaction, reduced health care costs, and improved efficiencies. 

To enhance the quality, appropriateness, and effectiveness of health care services, and access to these services the federal government in the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1989 (Public Law 101-239) established the AHCPR. The act, sometimes referred to as the Patient Outcome Research Act, called for the establishment of a broad-based, patient-centered outcomes research program. In addition to the traditional measures of survival, clinical endpoints and disease- and treatment-specific symptoms and problems, the law mandated measures of functional status and well-being and patient satisfaction. In 1999, then President Clinton signed the Healthcare Research and Quality Act, reauthorizing AHCPR as the AHRQ until the end of fiscal year 2005. Presently, its mission is to improve the outcomes and quality of health care, reduce its costs, address patient safety and medical errors, broaden access to effective services, and improve the quality of health care services. 

Establishing safety measures to guarantee the confidentiality of the protocol and the patients, to include protecting investigational samples, files, and computer programs... 

Take safety measure to protect the patient who experiences neuromuscular effects. 

HIT is finding an increasing role in healthcare dehvery and no longer is its apph-cation limited to simple order entry. Outside of medication management the evidence for HIT playing an active role in the reduction of risk is lacking and much more research is required [39]. This is hampered by no obvious or consistent benchmark by which to measure these benefits. Nevertheless, the prospect of HIT better informing care delivery makes it likely that in the near future improvements in patient safety will be achieved. The US Office of the National Coordinator for... 

However, when one considers more complex HIT applications such as the electronic patient record or order entry systems the risk-benefit argument becomes less straight-forward. To begin with, the benefits of HIT systems are often diverse and challenging to measure. A typical HIT system might deliver cost-savings, improved efficiency, convenience and of course improvements in patient safety. But how... 

Reproduced from Quality Safety in Health Care. C Brown, T Hofer, A Johal et al. "An epistemology of patient safety research a framework for study design and interpretation. Part 3. End points and measurement". 17, no. 3, [ 158-162], 2008, with permission from BMJ Publishing Group Ltd. 

The best measures of harm that we have, and apossible measurement model for patient safety in general (Burke, 2003), are rates of healthcare acquired infections. Most of these infections are preventable and are measured using standardized and well-validated systems and definitions. In the United States, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention has set out standard definitions, and hospitals have created epidemiology and infection control departments to independently monitor, report and reduce infections. 

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