The Joint Commission and Institute for Healthcare Improvement have mandated healthcare organizations to improve professional communication. Nursing students lack experience in communicating with physicians. As a result, recent graduates may not be prepared to meet the demands of professional communication to ensure patient safety. The authors discuss the SBAR (situation, background, assessment,...

BACKGROUND Patient safety regulations and medical error reporting systems have been at the forefront of current health care legislature. In 2000, Florida mandated that all physicians report, to a central collecting agency, all adverse events occurring in an office setting. PURPOSE To analyze the scope and incidence of adverse events and deaths resulting from office surgical procedures in Flor...

Status Following Cessation of Services The Joint Commission recently updated two policies— Accreditation Status of Organizations That Cease Services After a Disaster and Accreditation Status of Organizations That Cease Services or Do Not Have Patients for a Period of Time—as a result of an ongoing review of accreditationrelated policies. The updated language is effective immediately for all acc...

introduction: the application of organizational ethics in hospitals is one of the novel ways to improve medical ethics. nowadays achieving efficient and sufficient ethical hospital indicators seems to be inevitable. in this connection, the present study aims to determine the best indicators in hospital accreditation. methods: 69 indicators in 11 fields to evaluate hospital ethics were achieved ...

tions of noncompliance with hand hygiene protocol at Joint Commission–accredited organizations participating in the home health deemed status option will be documented by surveyors and will appear in the official survey report. This change, which became effective February 24, 2014, follows expectations set forth by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) during the deeming renewal pr...

When, in 2008, the Joint Commission released its Sentinel Event Alert #38 regarding MRI safety, it joined the ACR's Guidance Document on MR Safe Practices as one of two radiology best-practice documents establishing MR safety protections. However, particularly for MR providers who held both modality-level accreditation from the ACR, and enterprise-level accreditation from the Joint Commission, ...

Quantifying and improving the quality of health care is an increasingly important goal in American medicine. To address this need, the First Scientific Forum on Assessment of Quality of Care and Outcomes Research in Cardiovascular Disease and Stroke was held May 24 to May 26, 1999. This conference brought together providers, researchers, payers (eg, the Health Care Financing Administration [HCF...

Quantifying and improving the quality of health care is an increasingly important goal in American medicine. To address this need, the First Scientific Forum on Assessment of Quality of Care and Outcomes Research in Cardiovascular Disease and Stroke was held May 24 to May 26, 1999. This conference brought together providers, researchers, payers (eg, the Health Care Financing Administration [HCF...

Vol. 2, No. 21 ■ November 2002 Opioids have long been used to treat intractable headache, although not every practitioner is willing to use these agents. Because of their addictive nature, opioids can be a medicolegal minefield, with the recent oxycodone controversy a current example. However, groups such as the American Pain Society and the American Academy of Pain Medicine (AAPM) have worked ...