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...

The purpose of this article is to describe The Joint Commission's 7 foundations of safe and effective transitions of care to home: (a) leadership support; (b) multidisciplinary collaboration; (c) early identification of patients/clients at risk; (d) transitional planning; (e) medication management; (f) patient and family action/engagement; and (g) transfer of information. These foundations were...

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...

The Pediatric Nurses' Knowledge and Attitudes Survey Regarding Pain (PNKAS) is a modification of Ferrell and McCaffery's Nurses' Knowledge and Attitudes Survey Regarding Pain (NKAS) (1997). The survey was modified for use with pediatric nurses. Following these modifications, five national content experts in pain management rated the relevance of the items to establish content validity. Using da...

A shortage of psychiatrists threatens significantly to worsen treatment for the mentally ill. The nation’s psychiatric workforce is in crisis. Currently, 77% of counties in the United States have a severe psychiatrist shortage, and, with 50% of psychiatrists over the age of 55, the situation is likely to worsen. Public mental health systems, which are losing traditional advantages such as gener...

In 2006, JCAHO defined the second of its National Patient Safety goals as to “Improve the effectiveness of communication among caregivers”. The SBAR protocol gives practical guidelines for person-toperson communication but may not be appropriate in its current form for more complex contexts. This paper presents a case study showing communication processes in one ICU and illustrates important pr...

BACKGROUND Hospitals distant from the immediate site of an incident involving a hazardous materials (HAZMATs) release which could include chemical warfare agents, must develop emergency response plans (ERPs) to protect healthcare professionals if they receive potentially contaminated victims. The ERP must address OSHA, EPA, and JCAHO requirements. METHODS The VHA convened groups to develop a ...

In the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, God foiled man's attempt to build a tower reaching to the heavens. And the Lord said, 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do. .. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech'. Genesis 11: 6–7 Those familiar with the ...

OBJECTIVES To determine how well hospitals complied with the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) tobacco control standards, which required banning smoking in hospital buildings; to explore issues involved in developing and implementing smoking bans; and to ascertain the perceived success of the policies. DESIGN Postal survey conducted January through June 199...

The papers in this special issue are derived from a selection of presentations given at the RACHAD workshop titled ‘‘Pattern of Holocene Climate Change in Central Asia: Data Synthesis’’ held at Lanzhou University, People’s Republic of China, from 25th to 27th July 2006. RACHAD is INQUA Palaeoclimate Commission (PALCOMM) Project (#0502), concerned with ‘rapid climate change in Central Asia’s dry...