Showing posts with label medical mistakes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label medical mistakes. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Patient Safety: A Success Story, (A great example of why nurse intimidation can be lethal) @patiyer #nurseup #nursefriendly

Patient Safety: A Success Story, (A great example of why nurse intimidation can be lethal) #nurseup #nursefriendly:”Prevention of medical errors starts with correct medical orders and diagnosis. When that does not happen, the healthcare team is expected to question orders that are incorrect and don’t make sense. This narration tells the story of a patient injured in a car accident, a failure to diagnose a lung injury, and an order written by a physician that needed to be questioned.”

More about Patricia Iyer: 

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Discover! "Unconventional Nurse: Going from Burnout to Bliss" Michelle Podlesni, RN @MPodlesni
http://unconventionalnurse.com/al/

Discover Martine Ehrenclou, @Med_Writer, Author of "The Take Charge-Patient"
http://www.thetakechargepatient.com/

Power Strategies For Nurses:"Do your nursing shifts feel like you’re running full speed ahead on a treadmill that you just can’t stop?
http://revolutionarynurse.com/power-strategies-nurses-program-2/

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Tuesday, April 26, 2011

amednews: 1 in 3 patients harmed during hospital stay :: April 18, 2011 ... American Medical News

By Kevin B. O'Reilly, amednews staff. Posted April 18, 2011.

One-third of hospital patients experience adverse events and about 7% are harmed permanently or die as a result, according to a study that detected patient safety problems at a far higher rate than other methods.

The study, in April's Health Affairs, echoes two reports issued in November 2010 that showed rates of adverse events hovering near 25% among hospitalized Medicare patients nationwide and at 10 North Carolina hospitals.

The findings draw attention to the safety troubles that have lingered in U.S. hospitals in the 12 years since the Institute of Medicine's headline-grabbing report "To Err is Human." The study cited research estimating that up to 98,000 patients die each year due to preventable medical errors.

"This is one of the best studies that now gives us a sense of how much harm is happening to patients in American hospitals," said Robert Wachter, MD, chief of the medical service at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, who was not involved in the research. "There is a tremendous amount of harm befalling patients who are admitted to hospitals and humongous opportunities for improvement."

via ama-assn.org

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Monday, April 18, 2011

Hung-over surgeons more error-prone | Reuters

Surgeons might want to steer clear of alcohol the night before operating, according to a new report that shows a hangover fuels errors during simulated surgery.

While there is no question about the immediate effects of alcohol on surgical skills, there aren't any rules for how much doctors can drink the day before going to the operating room.

"Historically, the medical profession has had a reputation for high rates of alcohol consumption," Anthony Gallagher, of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and colleagues write in the Archives of Surgery.

"It is likely that surgeons are unaware that next-day surgical performance may be compromised as a result of significant alcohol intake."

To measure the degree of that impairment, the researchers invited eight surgeons and 16 students out for a night on the town.

via reuters.com

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Andrew Lopez, RN
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Thursday, April 14, 2011

When to sue your doctor or hospital Should you? | Eye Opener: The Nash & Associates Blog | %post_tags%

Recently, a CNN article titled “Harmed in the Hospital? Should You Sue?” described the story of a two-year-old baby with a septic infection who waited about five hours in the emergency department before being seen by a physician. The child ultimately needed several amputations as a result of the delay in medical treatment.

Using this tragic story as a point of reference, the article suggests a number of criteria to help patients decide when to sue and when not to sue a health care provider. For example, the article correctly suggests that a patient who has not sustained injury should not sue a health care provider even if the health care provider’s conduct might have been negligent. In medical malpractice cases, a plaintiff seeks monetary compensation for injuries. If there are no identifiable injuries, there simply isn’t a case for medical malpractice.

via medicalmalpracticeblog.nashandassociates.com

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Andrew Lopez, RN
Nursefriendly, Inc. A New Jersey Corporation.
38 Tattersall Drive, Mantua New Jersey 08051
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Wednesday, March 30, 2011

How safe is your hospital? - chicagotribune.com

Just before it was disclosed that a medical error at the University of Chicago led to the death of James Tyree, a well-known financier and philanthropist being treated for cancer, I was putting together a presentation examining the quality of care at some of the area's best-known hospitals.

Using publicly available data, I told a meeting of local health care executives that there were warning flags at several institutions, including the U. of C. Tyree, ironically, would have known about any actual problems in far greater detail. He served on the board of the hospital where he died from an air embolism in a dialysis catheter, and hospital officials said in an interview that they regularly report safety data to board members.

There's an important distinction between great doctoring and great safety. The U. of C. has a reputation for outstanding cancer care. That's likely the reason that Tyree, suffering from stomach cancer and pneumonia, had a relatively good prognosis when he entered the hospital and why his death so shocked his family and friends. But as a wise physician once warned, "Every hospital should have a plaque at its entrance that reads, 'There are some patients whom we cannot help; there are none whom we cannot harm.'"

via chicagotribune.com

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Andrew Lopez, RN
Nursefriendly, Inc. A New Jersey Corporation.
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Wednesday, March 2, 2011

e-Autopsy: Kaiser Hospitals Dig In to Data to Assess Mortality

You've heard the macabre joke that hospitals and doctors "bury their mistakes." Well, here's an interesting twist: At Kaiser Permanente hospitals in Southern California, doctors are doing precisely the opposite. They're rolling back time in the death process – exhuming their unknown mistakes so to speak – to see what, if anything, they can learn in order to save similar patients the next time around.

But they're not doing it the old way through invasive autopsies. Those are expensive, increasingly unpopular with families, forbidden by some religions, and often don't reveal that much about errors in the process of hospital care.

Kaiser has a new concept, the e-Autopsy.

Kaiser's hybrid manual and electronic mortality review uses storytelling and specialists' scrutiny to study medical charts of patients who died in the hospital. The process builds a precise timeline of what happened. The goal is to prevent death and/or improve end-of-life care by looking for places to improve—from ambulatory settings prior to admission to the inpatient bedside.

via healthleadersmedia.com

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Sincerely,

Andrew Lopez, RN
Nursefriendly, Inc. A New Jersey Corporation.
38 Tattersall Drive, Mantua New Jersey 08051
http://www.nursefriendly.com info@nursefriendly.com ICQ #6116137
856-415-9617, (fax) 415-9618

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Saturday, February 19, 2011

LegalNursingConsultant.com, Medical Legal Resources, Nursing Entrepreneurs

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Welcome.

This website is intended to be a resource for Legal Nurse Consultants, Attorneys looking to use their services, and nurses looking to enter the field of Legal Nurse Consulting. On our site you'll find a directory of LNCs by state and specialty.

Please Choose From The Following:

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Special Reports:

Legal Eagles: Put nursing, law and business together and what do you get? The exciting field of legal nurse consulting! By Barbara Marquand, Minoritynurse.com:"Gloria Blackmon, RNC, BSN, LNC, LNHA, never met the young man who lost his legs, but after reading over his medical records, the compassion she felt for him was as strong as if he had been her own patient. The young man had been living in an intermediate care facility for developmentally disabled adults when circulation problems in his legs became so severe that both limbs had to be amputated. His parents sued the facility and it was Blackmon’s job, as a legal nurse consultant for their attorney, to review the records and determine if they had a valid case."
Peter Fuhrman National Sales Manager
MinorityNurse.com
49 Foy Drive Hamilton Square, NJ 08690
phone: (609) 689-1033 fax: (609) 689-1034
todd.eckle@minoritynurse.com
http://www.minoritynurse.com/features/nurse_emp/07-09-01c.html

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Combine Nursing and the Law through Legal Nurse Consulting, Meghan Persichino, RN, BSN, LNC, Nursingspectrum.com:"Nursing and the law: While some nurses think only of the possibility of being sued, others understand the power of this partnership in improving health. These forward-thinking nurses are blazing a trail as legal nurse consultants (LNCs). An Emerging Role Nurses have been working alongside attorneys for almost 25 years, if not more. These nurses went by titles such as "nurse paralegal," "medical litigation consultant," and other monikers. In some instances, they combined the duties of both the paralegal and nursing professions; there was no uniform role definition."
http://nsweb.nursingspectrum.com/cfforms/GuestLecture/nursingandlaw.cfm

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Switching Gears Becoming a Legal Nurse Consultant Diane Barnet, RN, BA, Nursingspectrum.com:"It sounded so easy. On the strength of a guest opinion piece I wrote about the nursing shortage for The Dallas Morning News, an attorney contacted me in the spring of 2002. I was suspicious. What would a lawyer want from me? “I’d like to send you a case,” he offered. “But I don’t have any legal background,” I protested. “That doesn’t matter,” he replied. “You can write.”"
http://community.nursingspectrum.com/MagazineArticles/article.cfm?AID=12518

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Legal Nurse Consultant by Sara Courson, BSN, Career Development, PA State Nurses Association:"Legal Nurse Job Search Quick Links: What is a Legal Nurse Consultant Educational Requirements Specialty Certification Salary Ranges Entry Advice Associations Publications Schools References About the Author."
PA State Nurses Association
2578 Interstate Drive, Suite 101
Harrisburg, PA 17110
1-888-707-7762 717-657-1222
FAX: 717-657-3796
E-mail: panurses@panurses.org
http://www.psna.org/c_profdev_legalnurse.htm

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Legal Consulting by Nurses, By Joy Collins, RN, BSBA, CLNC, LNCC, Wild Iris Medical Education, Inc.:"Nurses have been assisting attorneys with their medically related cases for far longer than is generally realized. It is only lately that the sub-specialty of legal nurse consulting has become a recognized field of nursing that the media has thrust into the mainstream. As far back as the 1980s (and probably earlier), nurses and other medical professionals were assisting the legal world to arrive at a fair settlement by moving through the quagmire of medical records and jargon that we nurses take for granted."
Wild Iris Medical Education
PO Box 257 Comptche, CA 95427
(707) 937-0518 ph (707) 937-2546 fax nurses@nursingceu.com
http://www.nursingceu.com/courses/244/index_nceu.html

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Medical Information, The Internet, and You By Janabeth Fleming Evans R.N., R.N.C., Doereport.com:" As a medical-legal consultant and Internet researcher I am asked every day to find authoritative medical literature references for a broad spectrum of topics. The information I am looking for may be used to support a claim, to debunk an expert theory, or to educate the attorney during the course of a case evaluation. Changes in the way medical information is stored, accessed, and retrieved have created a wealth of health care information. The Internet provides free access to a great deal of the medical literature, either in full text or citation/abstract format. Because anyone with access to the Web can establish a Web page, many medical sites contain little useful information, even though they may be visually appealing. For this reason, the quality of information available varies from very good to poor, and some sites even intend to mislead. It is important to search for peer reviewed information, from an authoritative source.
1275 Shiloh Road Suite 3130 Kennesaw, Georgia 30144
Phone: 770.805.0460 800.338.5954 Fax: 770.805.0430
Email: info@doereport.com
http://nursingexperts.doereport.com/20001130janabeth.php

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Monday, January 31, 2011

Institute For Safe Medication Practices

Newsletters Professional Development
Consulting Services Self Assessments
Educational Programs Consumers

NEW Standard Concentrations of Neonatal Drug Infusions
FDA and ISMP List of Drug Names with Tall Man Letters
Guidelines for Standard Order Sets
Tool to assess risk in community pharmacy
Quarterly Action Agenda (Free CE)
High-Alert Medication List
Updated Confused Drug Name List
Community Pharmacy Medication Safety Tools and Resources
 
Articles of Interest
List of Products with Drug Name Suffixes
Error-Prone Abbreviation List
Pathways for Medication Safety
ISMP Guidelines
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ISMP and Doctor's Digest iPhone app.
More Tools...
via ismp.org

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Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Children's Hospital launches 'zero errors' initiative

Reeling from the deaths of two children due to medication errors, the staff of Seattle Children's Hospital devoted Saturday to special training designed to prevent a recurrence of the tragedies.

"It's so very important that we never forget that we harmed these children," said Pat Hagan, president of Children's Hospital. "We were all devastated by this when it happened. It struck us at our core."

Hagan said the patient deaths have been a "great, great tragedy for these families," and "a profound tragedy" for the hospital staff.

"We never want to forget how this feels. That feeling is going to be what drives us to continue to find ways to improve what we do here," he said.

Over 550 doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other staff members gathered at Children's for a special Patient Safety Day to address the medication errors that caused two deaths over the past 18 months.

More than 28 patient safety sessions were held, including 11 devoted to medication safety.

But first, participants gathered together in the morning to remember the two small patients who died.

"How we emerge from this situation today and over the coming months will be the real test of us as an organization," said Thomas Hansen, the hospital's CEO. "As I look around this room, I'm confident that we have the best and brightest people to rise to this challenge."

He told the staff "we must strive for zero errors, this must be our promise."

The day's sessions included topics such as decreasing verbal orders and increasing the safety of verbal orders when they are necessary, standardizing medications located on care units, ordering, dispensing and administration of high-risk medications, interruptions, provider-to-provider hand-offs and communication, ambulance transport and patient safety training using simulation.

Hospital spokesperson Louise Maxwell said Children's also is fully cooperating with state investigations of the recent medication errors and has made a number of improvements to decrease the chance of errors.

The hospital has also initiated a re-evaluation of the entire medication delivery system and launched a detailed analysis to determine why usual safety processes failed in each of the medication error cases.

Hospital officals said Saturday's special training did not affect care for patients or others needing urgent or emergency services.

via seattlepi.com

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Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Hospital care fatal for some Medicare patients - USATODAY.com

An estimated 15,000 Medicare patients die each month in part because of care they receive in the hospital, says a government study released today.

The study is the first of its kind aimed at understanding "adverse events" in hospitals — essentially, any medical care that causes harm to a patient, according to the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Inspector General.

Patients in the study, a nationally representative sample that focused on 780 Medicare patients discharged from hospitals in October 2008, suffered such problems as bed sores, infections and excessive bleeding from blood-thinning drugs, the report found. The federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality called the results "alarming."

"Reducing the incidence of adverse events in hospitals is a critical component of efforts to improve patient safety and quality care" in the U.S., the inspector general wrote.

The findings "tell us exactly what some of us have been afraid of, that we have not made much progress," said Arthur Levin, director of the independent Center for Medical Consumers and a member of an Institute of Medicine committee that wrote a landmark 1999 report on medical errors. "What more do we have to do to make sure that sick people can rest assured that they're not going to be harmed by the care they're getting?"

Among the findings in the report obtained by USA TODAY:

•Of the 780 cases, 12 patients died as a result of hospital care. Five were related to blood-thinning medication.

Two other medication-related deaths involved inadequate insulin management resulting in hypoglycemic coma and respiratory failure resulting from oversedation.

•About one in seven Medicare hospital patients — or about 134,000 of the estimated 1 million discharged in October 2008 — were harmed from medical care.

•Another one in seven experienced temporary harm because the problem was caught in time and reversed.

About 47 million Americans are enrolled in Medicare, a government health insurance program for people 65 and older and those of any age with kidney failure.

The adverse events found in the study weren't necessarily due to medical mistakes, said Lee Adler, a University of Central Florida medical professor who was involved in the study. For example, he said, an allergic reaction to a penicillin injection is an adverse event, but it's a medical error only if the patient's allergy was known prior to the shot.

Among the problems identified in the report were Medicare patients who had excessive bleeding following surgery or a procedure. For example, one patient had excessive bleeding after his kidney dialysis needle was inadvertently removed, which resulted in circulatory shock and an emergency insertion of a tube to allow breathing.

When the tube was removed the next day, the patient inhaled foreign material into his lungs and needed lifesaving medical help, the report said.

Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins University, co-author of the book Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals, said medical mistakes are "an enormous public- health problem."

"We spend two pennies trying to deliver safe health care for every dollar we spent trying to develop new genes and new drugs," Pronovost said. "We have to invest in the science of health care delivery."

via usatoday.com

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http://www.nursefriendly.com/twitter

StumbleUpon,
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******************************************************

Sincerely,

Andrew Lopez, RN
Nursefriendly, Inc. A New Jersey Corporation.
38 Tattersall Drive, Mantua New Jersey 08051
http://www.nursefriendly.com info@nursefriendly.com ICQ #6116137
856-415-9617, (fax) 415-9618

150,000 + Nurse-Reviewed & Approved Nursing Links

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