Weekly Must Reads in Patient Safety and Health Care (August 14, 2015)

Two messages from this week’s must reads in patient safety and healthcare – use opioids carefully and use pulse oximetry more.

(for more on opioids and patent safety, please see click on the picture)
(for more on opioids and patent safety, please see click on the picture)

But, before we get to this week’s must reads, our special thanks to all of you who tweeted about Rachelle Rotunda joining us as Digital Community Manager – including @safestartmed, @ParentNFamily, @BioAlliances, @Obesity_bio, @OwlerAlerts, @DeliveryDrug, @Stroke_bio, and @News_Pharma (if we missed mentioning you – our sincere apologies!).

Use Opioids Carefully

As reported by Medscape, a study in the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons found that “orthopaedic surgeons are the third highest prescribers of opioid prescriptions among physicians in the United States, contributing to what the journal called an ‘opioid epidemic’.”

Using a multimodal approach to analgesia has benefits. Pain Medicine News reports on a new study that compared a multimodal approach with conventional on-demand opioid-based pain management.

“We noticed not only drastic—almost a 50%—decrease in narcotic usage and subsequent decrease in opioid side effects,” said Vlad Frenk, MD, lead study author and director of the Acute Pain Service at Stamford Hospital.

For greater #patientsafety use #opioids careful Click To Tweet

Use Pulse Oximetry More

Source: http://blog.copdfoundation.org/the-deal-with-pulse-oximeters/
Source: http://blog.copdfoundation.org/the-deal-with-pulse-oximeters/

Using pulse oximetry more could help detect obstructive sleep apnea and acute respiratory distress syndrome.

Obstructive sleep apnea – a new study found that overnight assessment of oxygen desaturation helped identify obstructive sleep apnea. “The results showed that our screening process identified sleep disordered breathing in 87% of patients who followed up with a polysomnography,” first author Sunil Sharma, MD, said in a Thomas Jefferson press release. “We confirmed the high prevalence of undetected sleep disordered breathing among hospitalized patients and also validated a low-cost protocol to detect it.”

Acute respiratory distress syndrome – pulmonary ultrasound and pulse oximetry could be used in place of traditional radiographic and oxygenation evaluation for acute respiratory distress syndrome.

Using #oximetry could help detect obstructive sleep #apnea and acute #respiratory distress syndrome #ptsafety Click To Tweet

 

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