Tag: monitoring

5 Steps for Preventing Opioid Harm to Patients

By Stephanie Uses, PharmD, MJ, JD (Patient Safety Analyst, ECRI Institute), Lynn Razzano, RN, MSN, ONCC (Clinical Nurse Consultant, Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety), and Michael Wong, JD (Executive Director, Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety)

Inadequate monitoring for respiratory depression in patients receiving opioids poses the greatest risk and potentially resulting harm to patients. ECRI Institute recently released the 2016 Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for Healthcare Organizations and assigned inadequate monitoring its highest risk map of 80: Continue reading “5 Steps for Preventing Opioid Harm to Patients” →

Weekly Must Reads in Patient Safety (Oct 17, 2014)

Monitoring is the catch word for this week’s must reads. It keeps patients safe and prevents avoidable patient harm. While St Joseph/Candler Hospital just celebrated 10 years of being “event free”, each year an estimated 20,800 to 678,000 patients managing their pain with patient-controlled analgesia will experience life-threatening, opioid-induced respiratory depression. If you are scared about asking your caregivers about monitoring, just say Dr. Robert Stoelting (President, Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation) told you to. Continue reading “Weekly Must Reads in Patient Safety (Oct 17, 2014)” →

Monitoring for Respiratory Compromise to Detect Cardiac Arrest

In his op-ed, Lakshmipathi Chelluri, MD, MPH (Professor, Department of Critical Care Medicine, Co-chair, P&T Committee, UPMC Presbyterian, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine), asks a great question “Preventable In-Hospital Cardiac Arrests―Are We Monitoring the Wrong Organ?”[1]

To help prevent the onset of cardiac arrest, Dr. Chelluri suggests that clinicians should be monitoring for respiratory compromise as a key trigger or potential alert for cardiac arrest. Continue reading “Monitoring for Respiratory Compromise to Detect Cardiac Arrest” →