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Showing results for tags 'Monitoring'.
Found 136 results
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Content ArticleThe Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. We make sure that health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and we encourage care services to improve. When CQC inspects health and care services they assess how well these services meet people’s needs. As part of this, they look at how people’s medicines are optimised. Medicines optimisation is the safe and effective use of medicines to enable the best possible outcomes for people. It also looks at the value that medicines deliver, making sure that they are both clinically and cost effective, and that people get the right choice of medicines, at the right time, with clinicians engaging them in the process.
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Content ArticleThis case story highlights the missed opportunities that could have prevented a cardiac arrest and subsequent severe hypoxic brain injury in an intensive care patient.
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Content ArticleThis report from the AHSN Network shines light on ways we can do more to improve safety for residents of care homes. The publication showcases over 30 examples of projects delivered by England’s 15 Patient Safety Collaboratives (PSCs) and the Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs) which host them. They include case studies in medicines safety, dementia, monitoring and screening, and workforce development.
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Content ArticleThe Care Quality Commission (CGC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. They make sure that health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and encourage care services to improve. Independent acute hospitals play an important role in delivering healthcare services in England, providing a range of services, including surgery, diagnostics and medical care. As the independent regulator, the CQC, hold all providers of healthcare to the same standards, regardless of how they are funded.
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Content ArticleIn the last decade in the UK there has been a huge volume of data collected on medical error and harm to patients, as well as a number of tragic cases of healthcare failure and a growing volume of government reports on the need to make care safer. Despite this, we still don’t know how safe care really is. Assessing safety by what has happened in the past does not give us the whole picture nor does it tell us how safe care is now or will be in the future. Charles Vincent and colleagues from Imperial College London propose a new framework to help find the elusive answer to the question – how safe is care today? The hope is that this report will trigger debate and discussion that will lead to a new way of thinking about patient safety, and shape the safety improvement work of the future. The framework provides a starting point for discussions about what ‘safety’ means and how it can be actively managed.
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Content ArticlePatients, clinicians and managers all want to be reassured that their healthcare organisation is safe. But there is no consensus about what we mean when we ask whether a healthcare organisation is safe or how this is achieved. In the UK, the measurement of harm, so important in the evolution of patient safety, has been neglected in favour of incident reporting. The use of softer intelligence for monitoring and anticipation of problems receives little mention in official policy. This paper from Vincent et al. proposes a framework which can guide clinical teams and healthcare organisations in the measurement and monitoring of safety and in reviewing progress against safety objectives. The framework has been used so far to promote self-reflection at both board and clinical team level, to stimulate an organisational check or analysis in the gaps of information and to promote discussion of ‘what could we do differently’.
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Content ArticleThe purpose of this study was to describe patient engagement as a safety strategy from the perspective of hospitalised surgical patients with cancer.
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Content ArticleA team at South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in Middlesbrough developed a programme to raise awareness of acute kidney injury (AKI) and to recognise and treat the condition promptly. Since the programme started there has been a sustained reduction (36%) in AKI cases within the surgical wards at Middlesbrough. This successful programme and pathway has been shared with seven other trusts in the North East of England. As a result of the AKI project and its links to CRAB Clinical Informatics Limited (C-Ci), other NHS Trusts (Imperial, Frimley Park, Wexham Park, North Devon, St Helen’s, Lincoln, Yeovil, Bartholomew’s, The Royal London and Southend) have now also been consulted, meaning this project has the potential for much wider spread. Commonly AKI starts in the community so the team is now focusing on strategies to support primary care to reduce AKI in the community and to harmonise AKI aftercare between hospital and community services. The South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust team was also highly commended in July 2017 at the national Patient Safety Awards.
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Content ArticleEarly warning scores were developed to improve recognition of clinical deterioration in acute hospital settings. In 2015, the West of England Academic Health Science Network supported the roll-out of the National Early Warning Scores (NEWS) across a range of non-acute-hospital healthcare sectors. The objective of this study from Brangan et al., published in BMJ Open, was to explore staff experiences of using NEWS in these new settings. This study demonstrated that while NEWS can work for staff outside acute hospital settings, the potential for routine clinical practice to accommodate NEWS in such settings varied.
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Content ArticleThe assessment of acute-illness severity in adult non-pregnant patients in the UK is based on early warning score (EWS) values that determine the urgency and nature of the response to patient deterioration. This study from Freathy et al., published in the journal Resuscitation, aimed to describe, and identify variations in, the expected clinical response outlined in ‘deteriorating patient’ policies/guidelines in acute NHS hospitals.
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Content ArticlePatients with delirium have changes in their thinking and are often confused and cannot pay attention. About half of patients in an intensive care unit (ICU) have delirium during their stay. Research has shown that patients with delirium are more likely to die or to have long-term brain problems, including posttraumatic stress disorder, depression and other mental health issues, than those without delirium. Although nurses and doctors have tools to measure delirium in the ICU, it can be hard to identify and, in some cases, may be missed. Family members may be the first to notice that their loved ones have changes in their thinking or cannot pay attention. There are tools called the Family Confusion Assessment Method (FAM-CAM) and Sour Seven questionnaire that can be used by family members to detect delirium. However, neither of these tools has been used in an ICU. This study from Krewulak et al., published in CmajOPEN, shows that these tools can be used by family members to measure delirium in the ICU. The results from this study could lead to a change in policy that would involve partnering with family members to improve the diagnosis of delirium in the ICU. In turn, this would improve patient and family care and outcomes in the ICU.
