Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center has settled charges that it left a paraplegic man crawling around downtown Los Angeles' skid row by agreeing to pay $1 million and be monitored by a former U.S. attorney for up to five years. The settlement marks the biggest so far in the city's efforts to crack down on hospitals and other institutions that "dump" patients along skid row. Kaiser agreed to a smaller settlement in 2007, and the L.A. city attorney's office said it is investigating more than a dozen other hospital and medical offices suspected of dumping.
Sudden infant death syndrome is one of the leading causes of death for children under age 1. British researchers say bacteria might be a contributing factor. A recent study in the medical journal The Lancet found potentially dangerous bacteria such as staphylococcus aureus and E coli in nearly half of all babies who died suddenly and unexpectedly at a London hospital between 1996 and 2005. A SIDS diagnosis means that no other cause of death can be found in an otherwise healthy infant who dies suddenly while sleeping. In the United States, SIDS kills more than 2,000 infants every year. In Britain, more than 200 children die every year of the syndrome.
Consumer Reports launched an online tool that lets users compare hospitals on their treatment of patients with life-threatening chronic illness, based on the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care 2008. The New York Times reports that the data show the city's private teaching hospitals were among the most aggressive in the nation, ranking in the 94th percentile as a group, while the public hospitals landed in the 69th percentile.
Tampa (FL) General Hospital is conducting an internal investigation after staff members mistakenly started performing a cardiac catheterization on the wrong patient. The man was not harmed, but staff members failed to follow proper hospital policies to identify the patient before the procedure, said hospital representatives. Those who made the mistake "will be subject to the appropriate disciplinary actions," the hospital said in a statement. In announcing the error, Tampa General joined an increasing number of hospitals who choose to apologize for mistakes rather than deny them.
This Wall Street Journal opinion piece takes a look healthcare reform and argues that "free trade" for doctors (i.e., allowing more foreign-trained physicians into the United States) is essential to any reform efforts. The authors criticize Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for their "antipathy to foreign trade," and say neither have plans that address the need for more doctors.
We've all seen the designers on the home improvement networks talking about the design and flow of a home and how it can affect a person's energy. Turns out that feng shui is a valid concept in healthcare, too. We just call it evidence-based design.
This month in HealthLeaders magazine, I wrote about the new intensive care unit at the Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. When designing this ICU, Emory used evidence-based design to eliminate obstacles to quality patient care, and has since seen better patient outcomes and higher staff satisfaction.
Emory has moved most of the machines that typically surround patient beds to a ceiling mount, allowing staff members to have all the equipment they need at arm's reach—without it being in the way. "When we have a crisis, we have no trouble reaching the patient," says Ray Quintero, RN, department director of the neuroscience critical care unit. "A traditional room blocks you from moving freely around a patient's bed, but with the ceiling manager, that doesn't happen."
Each patient room is also equipped with a computer station that gives caregivers access to patient records right there in the room, so nurses aren't running back and forth between the nurse's station and the room to find medical information.
Emory isn't the only hospital that has decided to forego the traditional, long-corridor hospital design, says Robin Diane Orr, president of the Robin Orr Group, a consulting firm based in Santa Barbara, CA. "We're seeing a lot of new design features that go beyond convenience to consider issues of safety and quality care," she says.
It's rare to find a new hospital wing that has a long corridor with a nurse's station at the end of the hall, Orr says. Today's organizations are building units where the nurse's station is in easy reach of every patient room—meaning that nurses are able to check in on patients more often and spot a change in condition or an early sign of infection more rapidly.
And we can't forget employee satisfaction. Since Emory opened its new ICU, nurses report feeling more fulfilled with their work, which in turn means they provide better care for patients, says Owen Samuels, MD, director of neuroscience critical care at Emory.
"You've heard the saying, 'A happy wife is a happy life?' Well, a satisfied nurse makes for a happy patient and family," he says.
Maureen Larkin is quality editor with HealthLeaders magazine. She can be reached at mlarkin@healthleadersmedia.com.
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