The Food & Drug Administration is taking too long to announce and implement a program to track medical devices, according to the Advanced Patient Safety Coalition. The Coalition, consisting of of hospitals, patient advocacy groups, and clinicians, called unique medical device identification “a crucial factor” in improving patient safety and reducing the frequency of medical errors. An identification system that assigns a medical device unique number will mean quicker and more reliable recalls and better tracking of outcomes in patients who have implanted devices, representatives of the group added.
In a national survey of patient satisfaction conducted by Medicare, 73% of patients nationally said their nurses always communicated well. Just four hospitals in Northeast Ohio topped that figure, however. Some say the nurses could be so concentrated on providing care that the communication could be suffering, and that doctors may not be doing their part in communicating to the nurses.
In this entry from her blog in The New York Times, Tara Parker-Pope reports on a British study that shows many patients aren’t comfortable asking their physicians questions that allow them to take an active role in their own health and safety. The findings suggest patients are worried about insulting their doctors by asking safety-oriented questions, according to the study's authors.
The Ohio Children's Hospital Association has deemed successful a collaboration to improve quality. The OCHA and its six member hospitals created the Ohio Children's Hospital Association's Quality Improvement Collaborative in 2006 to promote improved quality of care at children's hospitals. The Collaborative focused on reducing preventable codes occurring outside of the neonatal and pediatric Intensive Care Units. Through the initiative, the Collaborative implemented a Rapid Response Team that reduced incidences of preventable codes by more than 20 percent, according to an OCHA release.
In a new report, researchers from the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice found variations in the number of services that patients with severe chronic disease receive at the end of life, depending on the hospital, region or state and not on how sick they are. Researchers examined spending on chronically ill patients during the last two years of life.
The number of reports of deaths linked to all versions of the blood thinner heparin have tripled, according to a report released by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA said there are now 62 reports of deaths of patients who experienced one or more allergic reactions and who were infused with heparin from Jan. 1, 2007 through the end of last March 2008. That compares to just 19 deaths from an earlier FDA report.