Despite the focus on appropriate use of opioids for pain management, ECRI Institute Patient Safety Organization (PSO) found that there are many hospitals that continue to experience opioid-related adverse events and deaths. To help prevent further patient harms and deaths, PSO conducted a deep dive analysis of adverse events related to opioids in the acute care setting.
Tag: Stephanie Uses
Opioid Safety is again an ECRI Top-10 Health Technology Hazards for 2017
The ECRI Institute released its annual list of top-10 health technology hazards. ECRI’s top 10 technology hazards should be top of mind for clinicians.
By Sean Power
The ECRI Institute released its annual list of top-10 health technology hazards. These hazards have major patient safety implications and should be top-of-mind for all clinicians and hospitalists who use health technology.
According to the authors of the report:
“Patients receiving opioids—such as morphine, hydromorphone, or fentanyl—are at risk for drug-induced respiratory depression. If not detected, this condition can quickly lead to anoxic brain injury or death. Thus, spot checks every few hours of a patient’s oxygenation and ventilation are inadequate.
“ECRI Institute recommends that healthcare facilities implement measures to continuously monitor the adequacy of ventilation of these patients and has recently tested and rated monitoring devices for this application.”
Last year, we interviewed Stephanie Uses, PharmD, MJ, JD, Patient Safety Analyst at ECRI Institute, to look at how hospitals and other healthcare facilities can prevent harm and death to patients with improved opioid safety. It is still relevant today.
Here is the interview in full.
You can also read the transcript here.
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”
Top Five Patient Safety Interviews
In honor of the fifth anniversary of the Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety (PPAHS), PPAHS today announced the top five patient safety interviews by PPAHS.
“To increase awareness and promote discussion about and practical solutions for patient safety issues, PPAHS interviews doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, and patients’ families,” said Michael Wong, JD (Executive Director, PPAHS).
By the number of views, the five most popular interviews on the PPAHS YouTube channel are: Continue reading “Top Five Patient Safety Interviews”
Weekly Must Reads in Patient Safety (Apr 10, 2015)
ECRI Institute has released its second annual Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for Healthcare Organizations list to help organizations determine where to direct their efforts: Continue reading “Weekly Must Reads in Patient Safety (Apr 10, 2015)”