Health Technology Hazards, 2015: Alarm Issues Still Lead ECRI Top 10

hazard/jasleen kaur, via Flickr hazard/jasleen kaur, via Flickr

It’s a new year, and the ECRI Institute has released its Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for 2015 report, highlighting new health technology hazards (and some older, persistent ones) for health care facilities and nurses to keep in mind.

Alarm hazards still posed the greatest risk, topping the list at number one for the fourth year running. But this year, the report focused on different solutions. Often, according to the report, strategies for reducing alarm hazards focus on alarm fatigue—a hazard nurses have long battled. Now, the report recommends that health care facilities examine alarm configuration policies and practices for completeness and clinical relevance. These practices include:

  • determining which alarms should be enabled.
  • selecting alarm limits to use.
  • establishing the default alarm priority level.
  • setting alarm volumes.

Repeat hazards that made the list included inadequate reprocessing of endoscopes and surgical instruments (#4), robotic surgery complications due to insufficient training (#8), and, in at #2, data integrity issues such as incorrect or missing data in electronic health records and other health IT systems. For an overview of these hazards, see our posts on ECRI top 10 health technology hazards from 2013 and 2014.

And here’s an overview of new hazards that made the cut, along with some of the report’s suggestions […]

2016-11-21T13:03:15-05:00January 12th, 2015|digital health, Nursing, Technology|1 Comment
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Long-Distance Coaching

Patrice Gopo is a writer living in North Carolina.

The author Patrice Gopo

Moments ago I’d been crouching on my bed, but now I lay wrapped in a thick duvet. My panting began to slow to a normal cadence. Then a sharp rush. My midsection hardened, followed by intense cramping. With a swift motion, I moved from lying on the bed back to all fours.

“Find your point and focus.”

I heard my mother’s words through the speakers of the computer. My eyes locked on where the edge of the metal curtain rod met the white wall.

Around me, voices and images drifted away.

Before I gave birth to my first child, I didn’t know that between a tightening abdomen and waves of pain, Skype conversations were possible.

While I appreciated that technology could bring someone distant close, my mother wasn’t supposed to be a face on the computer. She was meant to be by my side and not in a living room 10,000 miles away. But my daughter had decided to slide down the birth canal 12 days before expected.

My mother describes herself as a practical person. “I’m a nurse. It’s in the job description,” she often says. When pregnant with her own firstborn—my older sister—her contractions began in the midst of an overnight shift in the labor and delivery unit. She completed the night’s job before […]

2016-11-21T13:03:15-05:00January 9th, 2015|Nursing, nursing perspective, patient engagement, Patients|2 Comments
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‘Tables Turned’: When the Patient’s Family Member Is a Nurse

By Betsy Todd, MPH, RN, CIC, AJN clinical editor

Illustration by Eric Collins. All rights reserved. Illustration by Eric Collins. All rights reserved.

Nurses are not always comfortable when a patient’s family member is also a nurse. In AJN’s January Reflections essay, “The Tables Turned,” a critical care nurse describes her attempt to navigate the role change from nurse to family member when her sister is hospitalized with multiple injuries after a bike accident.

Her sister is in obvious pain, but pain management is complicated by a low blood pressure. The author asks her sister’s nurse about alternative analgesics. She writes:

“The nurse, perhaps caught off guard by my question, answered abruptly: ‘I don’t think so. We don’t do that here.’ There was a pause. ‘Don’t do what?’ I asked. ‘We don’t do IV Tylenol,’ she repeated. She did not offer an explanation, an alternative, or say she’d ask another provider… I felt helpless, both as a critical care nurse and as a sister.”

As if to reinforce that the patient’s sister is not welcome to participate in care discussions, the charge nurse soon comes by and suggests that the author “step out to get some rest.”

Of course we don’t know the nurse’s side […]

2016-11-21T13:03:16-05:00January 7th, 2015|career, narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective, pain management, Patients|5 Comments
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Are Nurses Ready for Retirement? Apparently Not

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Photo by Judy Schmidt/CDC Photo by Judy Schmidt/CDC

If you ask many nurses in their sixties if they’re ready to retire, they may heartily say, “Yes, can’t wait.” But if the question is whether they are financially ready to retire, the answer may be quite different.

In their article in this month’s issue of AJN, “Preparing for Retirement in Uncertain Times” (free until the end of January), authors Shanna Keele and Patricia Alpert note that surveys reveal nurses to be unsure of how to begin preparing for retirement. A 2011 survey reported that “71% felt they were not saving enough for retirement”; another survey revealed that “59% of nurses do not know how to begin the retirement planning process” and most do not feel knowledgeable about investing and other related financial processes.

Keele and Alpert, who’ve conducted research around nurses’ readiness to retire, “explore the obstacles that nurses, especially female nurses, confront in planning and preparing for retirement. We outline steps nurses can take to begin the process; discuss various types of retirement accounts; and refer readers to helpful, free online resources.” There’s also a box that lists crucial steps to take if you’re getting a late start on retirement planning. […]

2016-11-21T13:03:17-05:00January 5th, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing research|5 Comments
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AJN in January: Long-Term Complications of CHD Repair, Obesity Interventions, Nurses Planning for Retirement, More

AJN0115.Cover.OnlineAJN’s January issue is now available on our Web site. Here’s a selection of what not to miss.

Complications after cardiac repair. Nurses often encounter patients with complications that occurred years after congenital heart defect (CHD) repair. Yet many patients whose CHD was repaired in childhood have not had regular follow-up. Our CE feature, “Long-Term Outcomes After Repair of Congenital Heart Defects: Part 1,” the first in a two-part series, reviews six congenital heart defects, their repairs, and common long-term outcomes, as well as implications for nurses in both cardiac and noncardiac settings. This CE feature offers 2.5 CE credits to those who take the test that follows the article.

To further explore the topic, listen to a podcast interview with the author (this and other free podcasts are accessible via the Behind the Article podcasts page on our Web site, in our iPad app, or on iTunes). A video of an atrial septal defect device placement is also available in the iPad edition of this article.

Obesity interventions. Patients with obesity often face stigma and bias, even from the nurses who care for them. “The Obesity Epidemic, Part 2: Nursing Assessment and Intervention,” the second article in a two-part series, presents a theoretical framework to guide nursing assessment of patients with obesity and their families and reviews the most common lifestyle, pharmacologic, […]

2016-11-21T13:03:17-05:00December 29th, 2014|Nursing, nursing perspective|0 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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