Medication Reconciliation (Chat GPT): I have spent a few days looking back at the various years of ECRI safety lists. I have re-looked at the recurrent safety concerns and…they are daunting! Yet, even those that may not appear on the list of recurrent issues, they don’t seem easier. Each represent past harms and the possibility…
Author: RRHemphill
I am an emergency medicine physician by training, but have spent much of my career with a focus on trying to improve patient safety and quality of patient care. I have worked in government, military and large academic systems.
And…The 2024 ECRI Top 10 Patient Safety List
ECRI recently released their top 10 patient safety list for 2024. For more information follow this link.
Recurrent Themes in ECRI Patient Safety Lists
As you look through the last several years of ECRI Patient Safety List, you will see some recurring themes. They may change slightly, but in general they keep coming up. If you review these and you consider how difficult it may be to address some of these, I think it is understandable that they remain…
Top Safety Issues Over the Years
If you are interested in patient safety and what are the most current concerns about patient safety, a good source to review comes out of ECRI. The ECRI Institute is a nonprofit organization, promoting patient safety and healthcare quality. The institute provides reviews of medical devices, technology assessments, patient safety guidelines, and best practices for…
I Have Been Away
Traveled to Antarctica. It was wondrous, amazing, and magical. It is also fragile and in grave danger. These many years I have focused on patient safety. I now think about both this and also whether we might be stronger in all our goals if we also could pause in our work, in our struggles, and…
Ways to Stay Safe in the Healthcare System
I found an article from a bit over a year ago that discusses some of the harms that we see in healthcare. It reminds us that the problems are through out all of the areas that you might seek care. Inpatient, the outpatient office, pharmacies, etc. The article then offers a few strategies to help…
When Problem Solving Inhibits Safety and Improvement
In general, making improvements in a health care system can be difficult because of time constraints, cost concerns, competing priorities, and even skepticism about whether improvement projects make a difference. Yet, a surprising barrier can be the competency, ingenuity, and individual efforts of those that work within the existing system. How can this possibly be…
When Everything Goes Right
I am sure many heard a report in the last few days about a Japanese Airline that clipped another smaller plane while landing, burst into flame and yet hundreds of passengers were able to evacuate before the plane was fully consumed by the fire. Miraculous….. or was it? The airline industry spends a good bit…
Private Equity in Health Care – Yikes
Several friends sent me a link to an article that I had already seen. It’s upsetting but not surprising. the title of the article is “Serious Medical Errors Rose After Private Equity Firms Bought Hospitals”. You can find the article here. The title of the article pretty much tells you all that you need to…
Maintaining Competancy in Healthcare
The time to train to become a physician is considerable. Medical school, residency, sometime adding a fellowship. It’s a lot. The challenge then, is how to we maintain that level of competency as we spend years and years in practice. Many clinicians spend considerable time taking care of their patients and over time it can…
Improving Patient Safety and Team Communication Through Daily Huddles
I have talked previously about team communication and some structured ways for teams to communicate better. I want to discuss an article titled “Improving Patient Safety and Team Communication Through Daily Huddles,” available at this link. This article does a nice job describing the importance of something like a daily huddle as an effective strategy…
Difficult Times for Those in Health Care
The issue of burnout has been of concern within a variety of professions, including health care. There have been changes made in the training of young physicians to restrict the number of hours they can work at a time. More time off has also been added. Efforts to manage work-life balance have been more considered…
Handover Tools
There are a variety of tools that can be used when doing handovers or transitions in care. This is not a comprehensive list of the tools out there in the literature, to say nothing of local home grown tools that people may use. The goal is not to try and point to single tool, rather…
Global Elements of Effective Handoffs
Consider a patient who is admitted from the Emergency Department (ED) of your local hospital. Your patient is 73-year-old, has a history of severe coronary artery disease, but currently stable, prostate cancer, and rheumatoid arthritis. He is admitted for pneumonia because of his age, and mild hypoxia requiring oxygen. The first transition occurs when the…
Transitions of Care
If you were to map out a patient’s stay in a hospital you would find that there are numerous handovers. Some might be significant, such as a transition from an intensive care unit, to a regular ward bed. Or from the Emergency Room to an inpatient bed. Or from an inpatient status to home. Other…