Blog & Articles

[1 MIN READ]

If your organization is navigating the onboarding and integration process for newly employed physicians, you're not alone.

The Physicians Advocacy Institute recently reported that U.S. hospitals bought 5,000 independent physician practices between July 2015 and July 2016. The percentage of hospital-employed physicians increased by more than 63% from mid-2012 to mid-2016.

TSG's RSQ® Education - Physician Integration Program is designed to put the best practices of patient safety and risk management at the fingertips of your physicians and systematize your ongoing compliance training.

[7 MIN READ]

Obtaining the informed consent of the patient is required in all states before an invasive procedure that carries a material risk of harm is performed.

This is a non-delegable duty of the practitioner who is going to perform the procedure; this means that the practitioner is ultimately responsible for the validity of the consent and cannot avoid liability by claiming that it was someone else’s responsibility.

However, obtaining informed consent should not be construed to be an obstacle. Obtaining informed consent can be a mechanism for reconciling the expectations of all parties involved.

[7 MIN READ]

The care of the surgical patient is dependent upon doctors, nurses, technicians and both office and hospital staff. Like all humans, despite their best efforts, they make mistakes. Encouraging them to “try harder” simply will not work.

To reduce surgical errors we need to identify root causes and institute system-based processes to prevent them.

Studies have suggested specific areas that offer opportunities for improvement. Kim et al.^[1] noted that adverse events from surgical intervention are more commonly due to preoperative and/or postoperative errors. These include delay in diagnosis and/or treatment and communication errors between the healthcare team and the patient/family or other members of the healthcare team. Process measures that can address these issues include:

[3 MIN READ]

Headache is a common reason for a visit to practitioners in primary care, urgent care, and emergency medicine. Patients with the chief complaint of non-traumatic headache comprise 3% of all emergency department visits.

The vast majority of these headaches will have a benign etiology such as tension or migraine. Unpredictably interspersed among these benign presentations are patients with a serious cause of headache such as hemorrhage or CNS infection.

Malpractice cases involving headaches frequently involve the missed diagnosis of subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). The reasons the diagnosis of SAH is missed include the following:

[2 MIN READ]

Your organization might find itself hiring more new, inexperienced nurses for your emergency department due to the national nursing shortage. While these new hires arrive with a nursing degree, you need to be sure that each has a baseline set of knowledge to effectively treat patients in your ED.

Our RSQ® Solutions – Nursing Clinical Excellence Program was designed to help level-set the knowledge base of your clinical workforce. Our team of experienced ED nurses and educators compiled the blueprint below as a foundation for what an effective continuing education program might look like for your ED staff in their first three years of employment.

[5 MIN READ]

Despite the wake-up call given almost 20 years ago by the Institute of Medicine’s report “To Err is Human,” medical errors still occur at alarming rates.

The landmark publication estimated that up to 98,000 Americans die each year from medical errors, and one out of every twenty-five hospitalized patients is harmed by a medical mistake.

There is, however, cause for guarded optimism. Many organizations, agencies and legislatures have stepped forward and created solutions and educational programs targeted at reducing medical errors.

[2 MIN READ]

What does your organization’s Employee Satisfaction Survey really tell you about how staff feel about their roles/jobs? The survey result graphs demonstrate areas that need improvement and more, but do they capture the authenticity and essence of how staff feel when they step onto the unit each shift?

[4 MIN READ]

Patients with chest pain are a common and constant challenge to clinicians, whether in the office, clinic, urgent care or emergency department. The clinical presentations may be confusing, the differential diagnoses are myriad, and not all patients with chest pain will have a serious underlying etiology.

Lawsuits involving the care of patients with chest pain are frequent and make up the costliest group of malpractice cases in Emergency Medicine. The cornerstone of high-quality, defensible care consists of a systematic approach coupled with comprehensive documentation.

[3 MIN READ]

Malpractice claims related to the chief complaint of chest pain continue to plague clinicians. Foremost among these claims is the allegation of “missed MI,” which has now been expanded to include missed unstable angina as well as missed actual myocardial infarction.

Although the evaluation of the adult with chest pain is fraught with many pitfalls, one of the most glaring yet avoidable errors is the reliance upon “bedside maneuvers” to exclude the diagnosis of coronary etiology.

[9 MIN READ]

Standardization is known for reducing variation and increasing consistency; it continues to be a recognized safeguard to decreasing liability and improving outcomes.

High-quality postpartum care includes implementation of both standardized discharge processes and teaching that can improve maternal outcomes.

AWHONN promotes postpartum discharge standardization and encourages that specific components of postpartum discharge teaching align with leading causes of maternal morbidity and mortality.

While we previously outlined best practices in postpartum discharge teaching strategies, here we will discuss specific standardized teaching content that needs to be communicated to postpartum patients and their families at the time of discharge or sooner.

Educating patients and their families to recognize important warning signs and symptoms and clearly understand normal healing versus abnormal symptomatology is strategic in reducing maternal morbidity and mortality.