Claire Cox
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Everything posted by Claire Cox
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Community PostKeeping quality improvement going virtually - here’s some top tips from @mattcope16 on twitter - for running virtual process mapping.
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Content ArticleWhile COVID-19 coverage has been saturated with news of clinical cases, deaths, hospital shortages, and financial losses, it seems as though a key population has been excluded from the concern. The youth and young adult population, of all ethnicities and backgrounds, have not had the proper attention to their needs as other groups impacted by COVID-19 have. Particularly, these populations are at risk of severe mental health distress due to COVID-19 related financial, academic, and housing instability.
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Content ArticleTelemedicine and telephone-triage may compromise patient safety, particularly if urgency is underestimated. This paper from Haimi et al., published in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, aimed to explore the level of safety of a paediatric telemedicine service, with particular reference to the appropriateness of the medical diagnoses made by the online physicians and the reasonableness of their decisions.
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Content ArticleAs nurses worldwide feel the pain of prolonged personal protective equipment (PPE) use, we assess the advice on minimising the discomfort caused by masks and visors. Here are some simple tips to prevent skin damage while wearing PPE.
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Community PostDo you have a poster that you have produced that supports patient and staff safety? Want to share it with the wider community? Why not upload it to the hub? We would LOVE to see it. Its easy... here's how: Please email your posters to [email protected] as either a pdf, jpg, gif, png or ppt file (file size limit 10Mb). Alternatively, if your poster is already on a website, please email the url of the poster to us. Along with your poster, please provide a brief summary of what your poster is presenting (no more than 150 words). Posters should be relevant to anyone with an interest in improving patient safety, and meet at least one of the following hub content criteria: Evidence-based: either through evidence of an experience, practical application, analysis of data, or measured success or failure Create a learning opportunity Look at the systemic issues and solutions related to patient safety. Looking forward to seeing and sharing them. Claire
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Content ArticleThis infographic by the College of Emergency Nursing Australasia gives practical advice on how to speak up if patient safety is compromised.
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Content ArticleThere are fears around maintaining personal safety whilst ensuring patient safety. Staff need to protect both themselves and their families at home. Equally, it is essential that staff feel supported in identifying risks and the potential for errors with a robust mechanism in place to reduce, eliminate or mitigate such risks. The Human Factors 'Dirty Dozen' is a concept developed by Gordon DuPont. He described elements that can act as precursors to accidents or incidents, or influence people to make mistakes. This webinar, from the Clinical Excellence Commission, looks at ways you can identify risks or 'hot spots' in your area of work and then discuss with your team at handover and huddles and plan strategies to reduce, eliminate or mitigate the risks
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Content ArticleThe COVID‐19 pandemic has led to the manufacturing of novel devices to protect clinicians from the risk of transmission, including the aerosol box for use in intubation. The authors of this paper, published in Anaesthesia, evaluated the impact of two aerosol boxes (an early‐generation box and a latest‐generation box) on intubations in patients with severe COVID‐19 with an in‐situ simulation crossover study.
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Content ArticlePatient and family involvement is high on the international quality and safety agenda. This paper, published in the International Journal for Quality in Health Care, considers possible ways of involving families in investigations of fatal adverse events and how their greater participation might improve the quality of investigations. There is limited guidance and research on how to constitute effective involvement. There is a need for co-designing the investigation process, explicitly agreeing the family’s level of involvement, supporting and preparing the family, providing easily accessible user-friendly language and using different methods of involvement (e.g. individual interviews, focus group interviews and questionnaires), depending on the family’s needs.
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Content ArticleThe COVID-19 pandemic is challenging health care systems worldwide; none more so than critical and intensive care settings. Significant attention has been placed on the capacity of intensive care units (ICUs) to respond to a COVID-19 surge, particularly in relation to beds, ventilators, staffing and personal protective equipment. This position statement has been produced by the Australian College of Critical Care Nurses and the Australian College of Infection Prevention and Control (ACIPC) to guide critical care nurses in facilitating next-of-kin presence for patients dying from COVID-19 in the ICU.
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Content ArticleThe results of this US study are consistent with findings from China and Italy, which suggest that patients with underlying health conditions and risk factors, including, but not limited to, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, COPD, coronary artery disease, cerebrovascular disease, chronic renal disease, and smoking, might be at higher risk for severe disease or death from COVID-19. This analysis was limited by small numbers and missing data because of the burden placed on reporting health departments with rapidly rising case counts, and these findings might change as additional data become available.
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Content ArticleA six-minute communication science video how to protect yourself against disinformation during COVID-19.
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Content ArticleThe human factors ‘Dirty Dozen’ is a concept developed by Gordon DuPont. He described elements that can act as precursors to accidents or incidents, or influence people to make mistakes. This article by the Clinical Excellence Commission introduces the 'dirty dozen' and offers practical tips on how to reduced error int he workplace.
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Content ArticleDesperate times offer opportunities for the light to come streaming in. Currently, we are seeing that light in the outpouring of support and love for health and care staff across the world during this pandemic. In the UK, a large proportion of those staff come from ethnic minorities and some are dying at a much higher rate than white staff. The same is true in the general population. The authors of this article, published by the Kings Fund, take a look at the statistics and ask 'what are we to do now?'
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Content ArticleIn this BMJ paper, Neil Greenberg and psychiatry colleagues set out measures that healthcare managers need to put in place to protect the mental health of healthcare staff having to make morally challenging decisions. The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to put healthcare professionals across the world in an unprecedented situation, having to make impossible decisions and work under extreme pressures. These decisions may include how to allocate scant resources to equally needy patients, how to balance their own physical and mental healthcare needs with those of patients, how to align their desire and duty to patients with those to family and friends, and how to provide care for all severely unwell patients with constrained or inadequate resources. This may cause some to experience moral injury or mental health problems.
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Content ArticleAll hospitals have access to specialist palliative care teams, whether as in-house hospital palliative care teams or in-reach teams from local palliative care services. These teams will be able to provide advice and support, but it will not be possible for them to provide direct care to everybody who needs it, especially as the pandemic progresses. This NHS guidance is aimed at all professionals looking after patients with coronavirus, and their families, in the hospital setting.
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Content ArticleThe COVID-19 Mental Health Improvement Network has been set up by the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCPsych) on behalf of NHS England & Improvement. Its aim is to support mental health teams to share and learn from each other to maintain and improve safety in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This flyer has more information on the network and they are sharing changes that mental health providers have put in place to respond to COVID-19 challenges /safety issues on social media using #MHSIPCV19.
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Content ArticleThe assessment of patients who are unwell with COVID-19 or other causes presents a significant challenge for GPs and clinicians working in primary care. The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) and the AHSN Network held a joint webinar looking at the role of oximetry and other physiology in that assessment on Wednesday 29 April 2020. Watch the webinar here to find out more.
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Content ArticleHow can we help frontline clinicians? Sometimes medics may feel uneasy or even guilty and that they could be doing more. That was what a junior doctor in Abergavenny in Wales felt and she did something about it. In this podcast, the BMJ speak to Josie Cheetham about how she started her initiative to provide support boxes in hospitals for her colleagues working at the frontline, and how that initiative inspired others and mushroomed across the UK.
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Content ArticleFor the next few months this series of BMJ podcasts, Talk Evidence, is going to focus on the coronavirus pandemic. There is an enormous amount of uncertainty about the disease, what the symptoms are, fatality rate, treatment options, things we shouldn't be doing. Talk Evidence is going to try to get away from the headlines and talk about what we need to know, to hopefully give listeners some insight into these issues.
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Content ArticleDuring the COVID-19 pandemic it is important to reduce the variation in individual ward/service/organisational practices and try as much as possible to adopt a shared, safe standard for staff looking after ward patients. SPACES (Sharing Patient Assessments Cuts Exposure for Staff) is a standardised approach to the management of ward care. It is based on the principles of 'maximum patient contact, minimum staff exposure'. SPACES can help keep staff safe and reduce PPE use. It is for everyone working on a ward with suspected or proven COVID-19 cases, and particularly for multi-professional teams. Attached is more information and a poster for the ward area.
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Content ArticleThis guide from ICU Steps, contains advice and information about intensive care. It tells you how critical illness may be treated and what recovery may be like. Not every patient will experience all of these things, but they are more likely to if they have been in intensive care for more than a few days. Most of this guide is written for patients but there is a section specifically for relatives and visitors. By reading the guide, relatives will learn what a patient's recovery may involve and it will give them the answers to some of the questions they may have.
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Content ArticleTo extend the ICU Steps patient information guide, they have produced a series of information sheets on issues relevant to recovering intensive care patients. These documents are exclusively available online. They're free to download in PDF format for you to print, photocopy and distribute as needed. Topics include: Acquired brain injury and intensive care Breathing and critical illness Delirium and intensive care Looking after yourself after critical illness Medical tests in intensive care Planned treatment on the intensive care Tracheostomy in intensive care.
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Content ArticleAs the pandemic plays out, hospitals are reconfigured to increase critical care capacity, outpatient clinics become virtual, and elective procedures delayed. How are these affecting care for those who are in hospital but don't have COVID-19? In this podcast, Matt Morgan,honorary senior research fellow at Cardiff University, consultant in intensive care medicine and Partha Kar, consultant in diabetes and endocrinology in Portsmouth, join us to discuss how their working week is changing.
