Tag: continuous patient monitoring

3 Recommendations to Implement to Improve Patient Safety During Sedation

The Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety wishes you a safe and Happy New Year!

To help make 2019 patient safe, please implement the following 3 recommendations to keep your patients safe:

Patients Receiving Opioids Must Be Monitored With Continuous Electronic Monitoring

Much of the public attention has been focused on the harm caused by prescription use and abuse of opioids. However, there is another facet that must be focused on: opioid-induced respiratory depression in clinical settings. This includes patients undergoing moderate and conscious sedation, or recovering from procedures and managing pain using a patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) pump, particularly those during the postoperative period.

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Patient Monitoring Guide Features Manufacturers’ Answers on Their Monitoring Solutions

On the 7th anniversary of the Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety (PPAHS), PPAHS is pleased to release the Patient Monitoring Guide.

Since its first blog post 7 years ago, Michael Wong, JD (Founder and Executive Director, PPAHS) says PPAHS has advocated for continuous electronic monitoring of all patients receiving opioids. Mr. Wong explained that the primary motivation behind the Patient Monitoring Guide is to help answer questions posed by clinicians, hospital executives and risk managers about patient monitoring systems and to help them make decisions on which patient monitoring system best suits their clinical needs.

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ECRI’s Advice on Alarm Management

ECRI Institute’s Marc Schlessinger, RRT, MBA, FACHE, who is senior associate at their applied solutions group, recently spoke with the Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety (PPAHS) on how to improve alarm management. The interview can be heard on the clinical education podcast, “Improving Patient Safety and Reducing Alarm Fatigue: The Right and Wrong Way to Use Continuous Surveillance Monitoring.”

Michael Wong, JD (Founder/Executive Director, PPAHS) noted the work that ECRI has done to help improve patient safety and reduce alarm fatigue citing ECRI’s recent “Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for 2018:”

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Capnography use associated with reduction of adverse outcomes during procedural sedation

Millions of gastrointestinal endoscopy are performed each year in the US, with colonoscopies making up the majority of such procedures. Research conducted by Michael W. Jopling, MD and Qiu Jiejing published in BMC Anesthesiology concluded that capnography use associated with reduction of adverse outcomes during procedural sedation.

Their research sought to “estimate the incidence of pharmacological rescue events and death at discharge from an inpatient or outpatient hospitalization where [gastrointestinal endoscopic procedures] GEP was performed with sedation, and to determine if capnography monitoring was associated with reduced incidence of these adverse outcomes.”

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Today’s Must-Have: Capnography Monitoring During Conscious Sedation

Today, the Physician-Patient Alliance for Health Safety released a clinical education podcast with Matt Kurrek, MD, FRCPC (Professor, Department of Anesthesia, University of Toronto) and Richard Merchant, MD, FRCPC (Clinical Professor, University of British Columbia, Department of Anesthesia, Pharmacology & Therapeutics).

Drs. Kurrek and Merchant coauthored an editorial, “Yesterday’s Luxury, Today’s Necessity” after the Canadian Anesthesiologists’ Society [CSA] published its revised 2012 guidelines to the practice of anesthesia. The CSA guidelines recommend capnography monitoring during conscious sedation. In the podcast, Drs. Kurrek and Merchant discuss why capnography monitoring may have been considered yesterday’s luxury, but is now a necessity during conscious sedation.

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