The ECRI Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns of 2019

A list grounded in data and expert opinion.

Atlantic Training/Wikimedia Commons

Each year, ECRI Institute creates a list of top 10 patient safety concerns in order “to support organizations in their efforts to proactively identify and respond to threats to patient safety.”

The list isn’t generated out of thin air. The ECRI Institute relies both on data regarding events and concerns and on expert judgment. Since 2009, ECRI and partner patient safety organizations “have received more than 2.8 million event reports.”

2019 Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns

  1. Diagnostic Stewardship and Test Result Management Using EHRs
  2. Antimicrobial Stewardship in Physician Practices and Aging Services
  3. Burnout and Its Impact on Patient Safety
  4. Patient Safety Concerns Involving Mobile Health
  5. Reducing Discomfort with Behavioral Health
  6. Detecting Changes in a Patient’s Condition
  7. Developing and Maintaining Skills
  8. Early Recognition of Sepsis across the Continuum
  9. Infections from Peripherally Inserted IV Lines
  10. Standardizing Safety Efforts across Large Health System

[…]

2019-04-15T08:16:15-04:00April 15th, 2019|digital health, Nursing, patient safety, Patients|0 Comments
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Are Your PCA Pumps Accurate, and Working?

Device malfunction happens.

After orthopedic surgery several years ago, I awoke in the PACU to find nurses working frantically on one side of my stretcher. Simultaneously, I realized that my leg hurt. A lot. And with another moment’s awareness—awake enough now for my nurse’s brain to begin to kick in—I understood that all of the activity concerned my PCA pump.

neeta lind/flickr creative commons

One of the nurses noticed that I was stirring. “Your pump has malfunctioned. We can’t get the replacement to work. A third pump is on the way. I’m so sorry!”

The scramble for a replacement, and then another, probably lasted less than five minutes, but it was a pretty wild ride. My deep breathing in an attempt to control the pain gave me something to focus on, but it was a pretty weak effort up against bone pain in the immediate post-op period. I’m grateful that my nurses—there were at least three involved at that point—regarded the pump failure as an emergency.

But operator errors are more common.

Needless to say, then, I was particularly interested in a new study that appears in this month’s AJN. In “Errors in Postoperative Administration of Intravenous Patient-Controlled Analgesia: A Retrospective Study,” Yoonyoung Lee and […]

2019-04-10T09:29:43-04:00April 10th, 2019|Nursing, nursing research, patient experience, Patients|0 Comments
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Measles Outbreaks, and an Unexpected Vulnerability

The second-greatest number of cases since ‘elimination.’

3D graphical representation of spherical-shaped, measles virus particle studded with glycoprotein tubercles. CDC/ Allison M. Maiuri, MPH, CHES

Last month, a state of emergency—which has now been halted by state court—was declared in nearby Rockland County, New York, barring children who hadn’t been vaccinated against measles from public places. The unprecedented step made worldwide news and highlights the public health measures being taken to stem the six currently ongoing measles outbreaks in the United States.

Measles was eliminated in the United States in 2000, but outbreaks have occurred since, increasingly so in recent years. The CDC reported this week that almost 400 cases of measles have been confirmed in 15 states during the first three months of this year alone. This is the second-greatest number of reported cases since eradication of the disease. The most—667 cases—occurred in 2014.

Public health authorities are clear about the cause of these outbreaks: people contract measles abroad and bring it back to the United States, where groups of people who are unvaccinated are particularly susceptible to developing and spreading this highly contagious disease. Up to 90% of unvaccinated […]

2019-04-08T07:55:37-04:00April 8th, 2019|infectious diseases, Nursing, Public health|3 Comments
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Control: Ninety, and Still Haunted by a Husband’s Dying Promise

I will forever be haunted by the passing of Mrs. Haley. On the final days of her life, I was deemed her best, last support, because I knew something about the dangers of control. Or so I thought.

Work that changes you.

‘I will know, and you will pay’

One aspect of having a diverse occupational history within the mental health field is that you take something with you from every experience. However, there was one job that I wanted to walk away from clean, having taken nothing. Prior to becoming a nurse, I worked as an advocate for a domestic violence shelter. The position involved community education, outreach advocacy, supportive therapy, and violence prevention school programs. Those five years of my life were a relentless and eye-opening study of the dangers of control.

Domestic abuse or intimate partner violence is all about control, about an unhealthy balance of power in an intimate relationship. Advocates in the shelter provide a voice for the victims who suffer from domestic violence. Anyone can be vulnerable, regardless of gender or identification. According to the CDC, one in four women have experienced intimate partner violence (and one in nine men). Intimate partner violence remains a pervasive undercurrent in our culture, one still supported […]

2019-04-05T09:50:54-04:00April 5th, 2019|Nursing|1 Comment
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What Do Haiku Have to Do with Nursing?

Nurse poets among us.

April is National Poetry Month, and all kinds of excellent poetry will be highlighted in various online and other venues, including, of course, in AJN’s Art of Nursing column, where the poem “Cat-a-tonic” by Shawna Swetech is featured this month (click on the pdf in the upper right corner of the landing page for the best version). I’m not a poet, though there are many nurse poets among us, and I’m not a fan of every poem I meet, but one form that is guaranteed to interest me every time is the haiku.

A short, simple poetic form.

Centuries ago, Japanese poets wrote the first haiku poems. A haiku has a very specific structure:  three lines only, with exactly five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. Five-seven-five. (Though not every haiku today follows these rules strictly.) A haiku might rhyme, or not; it may or may not include punctuation or typical capitalization.

“Scrubs” not “uniforms” –
simpler than we used to wear.
Still, I miss my whites.

Traditionally, haiku have been written to celebrate nature. The best of these paint beautiful pictures in a few simple words. They are often very musical to the ear, […]

2019-04-02T07:57:53-04:00April 2nd, 2019|Nursing, writing|6 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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