PPAHS

Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety is a national advocacy force for addressing patient health and safety priorities that are shared by patients, physicians, regulators, and industry. PPAHS facilitates patient-to-clinician dialogue by improving patient adherence, removing barriers, material translation, and promoting access. By doing so, we seek to ensure that the best practices, communication skills, medications, medical inventions, and technology that can improve care and reduce costs are employed.

“Spot checks of SpO2, as are commonly taken on med/surg floors, need to be eliminated from patient monitoring practice because these single measurements may mislead a provider into thinking the patient is fine when in fact they may be close to the precipice of unrecoverable respiratory depression. Entering a patient room and placing a pulse oximeter on their finger stimulates their consciousness and respiration sufficiently to falsely elevate their reading, particularly when they are receive supplemental oxygen. Once the provider leaves the room, this stimulus fades and the patient may lapse back into a dangerous level of respiratory narcosis.”

Dr. Frank Overdyk, Executive Director for Research, North American Partners in Anesthesiology, and Professor of Anesthesiology at Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine

“Monitoring patients for how much carbon dioxide they are breathing out with capnography provides us with the earliest possible indicator to detect the onset of opioid-induced respiratory depression. Continuously electronically monitoring with capnography will save lives.”

Dr. Cheryl Wibbens, Chief Medical Officer at Memorial Hospital