Blog & Articles

[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.

[2 MIN READ]

Designing a continuing education program for your obstetrics department can be a challenging task. You want to balance the needs of all clinicians on your unit, address areas of concern, and keep pace with the ever-changing landscape of evidence-based practice and emerging national guidelines and trends. TSG’s RSQ® Solutions – Obstetrics Education program can meet your needs; our online library offers you the ability to customize your own program specific to the challenges of your own OB unit.

[6 MIN READ]

An adverse drug event (ADE) is defined as harm experienced by a patient resulting from exposure to a medication. An ADE can be caused by an error or poor care, but it is estimated that about half of ADEs are caused by a medication error; these are known as preventable adverse drug events.

Statistics are staggering; they reveal that ADEs lead to 700,000 ED visits, 100,000 hospitalizations, and between 7,000 and 9,000 deaths every year in the U.S. Even within the “safe” confines of hospital care, about 5% of hospitalized patients experience an ADE. 

Opioid analgesic use in the hospital setting is usually safe, but it is also associated with serious ADEs. In this issue, we present a case of an adverse drug event that illustrates many of the features known to contribute to opioid-related ADEs in the hospital. Whether this ADE was preventable, treatable or unavoidable – you be the judge!

[1 MIN READ]

As you start an emergency medicine training program, it can be overwhelming deciding where to start with your coursework.

Here we'll outline our recommendations for both how to approach topic selection, as well as course timing, based on our experience working with the largest healthcare systems in the country over the past twenty years.

[5 MIN READ]

In prior blogs, I reviewed the bare-bones of EMTALA, highlighted recent studies of EMTALA investigations, and summarized recently settled cases of EMTALA violations. In this installment, I outline the requirements of EMTALA as they relate to the role of the on-call physician.

EMTALA was passed to prevent the dumping of “non-paying” patients between hospitals. With the enactment of EMTALA, the dumping problem has diminished. The on-call physician plays a key role in patient management under EMTALA.

The “emergency medical system” depends upon emergency department access, availability of specialist physicians through the on-call roster, hospital bed and staff availability, and a referral system for tertiary or highly specialized care.