ECRI’s Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for 2014

safety Photo © One Way Stock.

For the past few years, we’ve highlighted the ECRI Institute’s annual Top 10 Health Technology Hazards report, which provides an overview of new and old technology hazards for health care facilities to keep in mind (read this year’s post here).

Now ECRI has released a new report entitled “Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for Healthcare Organizations.” The goal of the list, according to ECRI, is to “give healthcare organizations a gauge to check their track record in patient safety.” The list, which will be published on an annual basis, draws upon more than 300,000 patient safety events, custom research requests, and root-cause analyses submitted to the institute’s federally designated patient safety organization (PSO) for assessment. A selection from the top 10 can be found below.

Poor care coordination with a patient’s next level of care

The concern: Gaps in communication about patient care—for example, between hospital and provider, among providers, and between long-term care settings and hospitals—have been reported to ECRI’s PSO. And while it is best practice for hospitals to send a patient’s discharge information to all of a patient’s providers, this doesn’t always happen.

Some suggestions: On reason information doesn’t get passed on, according to the report, is that staff aren’t always able […]

2016-11-21T13:04:28-05:00June 20th, 2014|Nursing|1 Comment
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Drunk on Water, Drug Shortages, Understanding Health Care News, Plus Nursing Blog Posts of Note

The water myth: A physician, writing in the British Medical Journal (abstract only), has looked at the evidence for drinking eight glasses of water a day and says the oft-recommended practice is “debunked nonsense,” a myth the bottled water companies have been only too happy to exploit and that many respected health care organizations and experts continue to support. Maybe common sense reasoning is also partly to blame—after all, the idea seems to make sense. And all that water certainly conjures images of purification, which is inevitably appealing in a world of pervasive toxins, chemicals, food additives, and the like, and in a time when fewer people in any given Western country practice the same or similar religious sacraments or rituals, practices that may—among other functions—have once served a similar “purifying” psychologic purpose.

Drug shortages: The Wall Street Journal Health Blog has reported on two surveys that suggest that “unprecedented” drug shortages are being experienced by most hospitals. The reasons are multiple: shortage rumors that prompt hoarding, FDA actions that halt production, lack of a crucial ingredient, poor inventory management, and others:

All treatment categories were affected, hospitals said, with 80% or more respondents experiencing shortages of surgery/anesthesia, emergency care, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal/nutrition, pain or infectious disease drugs. And 66% of hospitals reported shortages of cancer drugs. Some 47% […]

2016-11-21T13:12:26-05:00July 15th, 2011|healthcare social media, Nursing|5 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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