The director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality says pharmacists have an important role in improving medication safety in emergency departments. Carolyn M. Clancy, MD, emphasizes the growing need to employ pharmacists to reduce the risk of adverse drug events in the EDs. Clancy adds that the "Introducing an Emergency Pharmacist into Your Institution" initiative helps hospitals obtain support for and implement emergency pharmacist programs.
New York State Sen. Kenneth LaValle said he plans to reintroduce legislation by to put "more teeth" into Stony Brook University Medical Center's oversight board. The oversight board was not informed until recently of a case in which diseased organs were transplanted from a 15-year-old Sag Harbor boy. LaValle also wants to introduce a bill to ensure that transplant doctors statewide are following best practices.
The Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center supports telling the public about its infection rates, despite the medical center having Pennsylvania's highest infection rate in a recent report.
The report looks at infections that strike patients after they enter the hospital, and nearly five out of every 100 patients came down with an infection at Hershey. The authors of the report by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council warned people not to use the infection rates to make harsh judgments or compare hospitals, saying the process of reporting infections is complicated and new. Some hospitals might not even be detecting or reporting all of their infections, the council added.
At the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America's annual meeting in Orlando, FL, the medical director of Infection Control at North Carolina's Pitt County Memorial Hospital said a program is making significant progress in reducing the number of patients bringing MRSA into the hospital. The hospital made a considerable investment in its "search and destroy" approach to MRSA, totaling $950,000 for new technology, kits and employees, according to the report. PCMH has the ability to run 30 MRSA tests at a time in its detection system for up to 150 tests per day.
Milford (MA) Regional Medical Center has reached out to its non-medical personnel and volunteers to encourage them to wash their hands while moving about the hospital and installed hand sanitizing stations near patients' rooms to encourage visitors to keep their germs away from hospitalized loved ones. The hospital is now trying to take its in-house campaign outside its borders to towns within its service area.
Two recent federal reports on hospital quality agreed that hospitals in Florida, on average, fall below the national norm. Hospital care in Florida was rated "weak" relative to the rest of the country by the congressionally mandated Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Just days later, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services posted patient-satisfaction scores on its Web site for virtually every U.S. hospital. On average, Florida hospitals lagged the nation in all of the 10 listed categories-from patients' overall rating of their hospital experience to their satisfaction with staff communication, pain management and room cleanliness.