Use of an App for Improved Documentation During a Code

A code or rapid response announced over the hospital PA system typically leads to a flurry of activity and a swarm of people responding to the patient’s needs. Many steps of the ACLS algorithm happen rapidly and concurrently, and can be difficult to track with accurate timestamps by the person assigned the role of scribe.

Clear and accurate documentation is critical for post-event analysis to demonstrate the team did everything according to standards and determine if things could have gone better. Many facilities use a code sheet kept on or near the crash cart and others use real-time charting in the EHR. Often the details are written on scrap paper and added to a document later. All of these methods are cumbersome and can lead to inaccurate data collection.

Using an app for documentation during code events.

This month’s Cultivating Quality article, “Improving Accuracy in Documenting Cardiopulmonary Arrest Events,” describes the use at one hospital (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston) of a handheld electronic device for code documentation that makes it simpler and more organized to capture this information.

The project took place on four medical–surgical pilot units, where nurses were trained in the use of a documentation app for live cardiopulmonary arrest events. The American Heart […]

2022-06-15T14:10:43-04:00April 21st, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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Should Medical Errors Result in Jail Time?

Image via PxHere

On March 25, Tennessee nurse RaDonda Vaught was convicted of criminally negligent homicide and negligent abuse of an impaired adult for a 2019 medication error that resulted in the death of a patient. We covered this story as it first unfolded three years ago. In fact, the most recent update on our blog, published in March 2019, reported that state health officials had considered the circumstances surrounding the error and declined to take any action.

Outrage from multiple nursing and health care organizations.

Subsequently, however, the Tennessee board of nursing revoked Vaught’s license and the decision was taken to charge her after all. In the past weeks, Vaught’s conviction has sent shock waves through the health care professional community, and many organizations have spoken against the verdict:

From the statement by the American Nurses Association:

“Health care delivery is highly complex. It is inevitable that mistakes will happen, and systems will fail. … The non-intentional acts of Individual nurses like RaDonda Vaught should not be criminalized to ensure patient safety.”

From the statement of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses:

“Decades of safety research, including the Institute of Medicine’s pioneering report To Err Is Human, has demonstrated that […]

2022-04-07T10:34:01-04:00April 7th, 2022|Nursing, nursing career|1 Comment
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Column Spotlight: Learning to Be Strip Savvy When Reading ECGs

“In my experience, many nurses working outside of critical care haven’t had a lot of training in reading and understanding basic ECGs.”

Have you ever learned something new and thought to yourself, how did I miss this? Why didn’t I know about this sooner?

Now more than ever people are finding information by searching for it on their own. The days of reading a print journal cover to cover are, for the most part, behind us. Many readers find articles by searching for a specific topic of interest. While this approach can be useful, you risk missing out on all that rich content in a journal issue you didn’t know that you needed to know.

One of AJN’s great features is our broad coverage of nursing topics.

We intentionally put together each issue to bring nurses the information they need to stay on the top of their professional game. For this reason, I like to highlight our columns here every now and then. (See, for example, my spotlight on our Nursing Research, Step by Step column).

Another great column nurses might be missing out on is Strip Savvy, written by Nicole Kupchik and Joel Green. This month’s installment, “A Case of an Asymptomatic […]

2022-02-02T10:18:08-05:00February 2nd, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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If Nurses Are War Heroes, They Deserve Real and Lasting Support

Matthew Waring/Unsplash

The rhetoric of war is regularly applied to health care, whether we’re talking about a patient “fighting” cancer or “frontline” workers like nurses engaged in a “battle” or a “war” against a new infectious disease. This is a habit beloved of speech makers, academics, and journalists, and it’s likely to continue.

With strong metaphors comers real responsibility.

Rather than decrying this practice in favor of a more purely accurate use of language, the author of this month’s Viewpoint, Lorri Birkholz, DNP, RN, NE-BC, an assistant professor of nursing at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, argues that the choice to use such language comes with responsibility.

“If war language is going to be used to define this pandemic and the nurses caring for patients, then legislation must ensure care for their acute and long-term physical and mental well-being.”

Birkholz notes that federal COVID-relief legislation limited provisions for frontline workers to temporary hazard pay and mandated sick leave—far short, by way of comparison, of that received by 9/11 first responders or returning war veterans. […]

2022-01-24T09:56:24-05:00January 24th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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Migraines: A Comprehensive Review of the Most Debilitating Primary Headache Type

r. nial bradshaw / flickr creative commons

This month’s CE feature article, Diagnosing and Managing Migraine, is one I’m sure many readers will relate to, and perhaps even find some answers in for their own headaches.

Like many women, I could count on experiencing at least one each month—classic menstrual migraines—that would begin with a visual aura of wavy lines that made reading or driving impossible. Sometimes, taking acetaminophen or ibuprofen right at the onset of the aura and relaxing/lying down, could prevent it from progressing further.

Otherwise, I would become overly sensitive to lights and sounds and develop a pounding headache and nausea that made me retreat to a dark, quiet room for several hours until the headache passed.

The most debilitating type of primary headache.

The authors note that “90% of the U.S. population will develop a headache within their lifetime.” Migraine, the most debilitating type of primary headache (that is, when the headache is the disorder as opposed to being secondary to other causes), occurs in about 12% of the population. I was surprised that while prevalence is fairly equally distributed among boys and girls prior until puberty (2.5 or 2.4 percent), it changes dramatically post-puberty:

“The greatest difference between the sexes occurred between the ages of 20 and 40, when […]

2022-01-14T16:11:56-05:00January 14th, 2022|Nursing|1 Comment
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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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