Quality problem or issue A patient survey found significantly fewer patients reported they had self-administered their medicines while in hospital (20% of 100 patients) than reported that they would like to (44% of 100). We aimed to make self-administration more easily available to patients who wanted it. Initial assessment We conducted a failure, modes and effects analysis, collected baselin...

Despite the classification as known or suspected human carcinogens, by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the antineoplastic drugs are extensively used in cancer treatment due to their specificity and efficacy. As human carcinogens, these drugs represent a serious threat to the healthcare workers involved in their preparation and administration. This work aims to contribute to bet...

The Veterans Health Administration (VHA), one of three administrations within the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), is the largest integrated health system in the United States. Suffering deservedly or not during the 1980s and early 1990s from a tarnished reputation of bureaucracy, inefficiency, and mediocre care, the VA sought to reinvent itself beginning in 1995 as a model system character...

BACKGROUND: Timely access to healthcare is essential to ensuring optimal health outcomes, and not surpris­ ingly, is at the heart of healthcare reform efforts. While the Veterans Health Administration (VA) has made improved access a priority, women veterans still underutilize VA healthcare relative to men. Eliminating access disparities requires a better understanding of the barriers to care th...

INTRODUCTION Tapentadol is a centrally acting analgesic that has been available for the management of acute and chronic pain in routine clinical practice since 2009. METHODS This is the first integrated descriptive analysis of post-marketing safety data following the use of tapentadol in a broad range of pain conditions relating to the topics overall safety, dose administration above approved...

Feds are trying hard to plug the numerous holes in the healthcare dam. The Obama administration announced on June 25, 2014 that a new anti-fraud program in Medicare doubled the amount of improper payments it identified or prevented this year.3 The Fraud Prevention System at CMS recovered or prevented more than $210 million of improper payments in its second year, the agency told Congress in a r...

The principal themes for the Biomedical Research and the Environment Conference Committee on Environmental Economics in Biomedical Research include the following: healthcare delivery companies and biomedical research organizations, both nonprofit and for-profit, need to improve their environmental performance; suppliers of healthcare products will be called upon to support this need; and improv...