The number of drugs provided by the Emergency Departments (EDs) in the United States is as high as 212.1 million per year and the number of ED visits has increased by 32% between 1996 and 20061. Medication errors in EDs are associated with a higher rate of adverse drug events than those that occur in other levels of acute health care, such as intensive care units, surgical units and medical uni...

BACKGROUND Informed consent is an important part of the patients' rights and hospitals are assigned to obtain informed consent before any diagnostic or therapeutic procedures. Obtaining an informed consent enables patients to accept or reject their care or treatments and prevent future contentions among patients and medical staff. METHODS This survey was carried out during 2011-2. We assessed...

OBJECTIVES While internship training is well established for medical records and for healthcare quality improvement, it is not quite so for training related to IT/health informatics. A comparison was made on the hospital-based IT/health informatics internship training received by students completing their training at the Imam AbdulRahman Bin Faisal University (IAU) in the Eastern province of Sa...

glossary and in a Leadership standard in the Comprehensive Accreditation Manuals has been revised to behaviors that undermine a culture of safety. This change is applicable to the ambulatory care, behavioral health care, critical access hospital, home care, hospital, laboratory, long term care, and office-based surgery accreditation programs. The Joint Commission introduced revisions in 2009 to...

Background: Hospital accreditation is an external evaluation of a hospital’s structures, processes and results by an independent professional accreditation body using pre-established optimum standards. Hospital accreditation has an important role in improving quality, safety, effectiveness and efficiency of hospital services. A generic questionnaire is usually used to accredit all hospitals. Ho...

Various organizations are engaged in activities related to assessing the quality of medical care, This appendix describes the efforts of three groups: the American Medical Association (AMA); the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO); and utilization and quality control peer review organizations (PROS). As a professional organization, a nonprofit accrediting b...

INTRODUCTION Government agencies are increasingly emphasizing opioid safety in hospitals. In 2012, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) started a sentinel event program, the "Safe Use of Opioids in Hospitals." We sought to determine if opioid use patterns in our emergency department (ED) changed from 2011, before the program began, to 2013, after start of th...

Science is ever changing and so is medicine. Some certainties today may not be valid tomorrow. New research, observations and outcomes can turn widely used current practices into no longer acceptable ones. Additionally, and especially in medicine, one may find more than one right answer to the same problem. Different physicians, with different backgrounds, may choose different ways to address a...