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Showing results for tags 'Virus'.
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Content ArticleThe primary objective of this study, published in Intensive Care Medicine, was to investigate the risk of ICU bloodstream infection (BSI) in critically ill COVID-19 patients compared to non-COVID-19 patients. Authors conclude: "The ICU-BSI risk was higher for COVID-19 than non-COVID-19 critically ill patients after seven days of ICU stay. Clinicians should be particularly careful on late ICU-BSIs in COVID-19 patients. Tocilizumab or anakinra may increase the ICU-BSI risk."
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- Infection control
- Healthcare associated infection
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Content ArticleTo safeguard patient safety and the wellbeing of healthcare staff, a realistic approach to tackling the backlog of non-COVID care is needed. NHS and public health services have been running ‘hot’ for a prolonged period of time and an overstretched and exhausted workforce must now be given time to rest and recuperate as they meet the challenges ahead. If staff are being pushed too hard to restore routine care in an unrealistic timeframe and without suitable resources, the likelihood is that we will see a workforce squeeze due to a combination of increasingly high staff absence rates and staff reducing their hours or leaving the workforce altogether. This would make it harder for health services to get back on track and provide timely and safe care to patients who need it.
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Content ArticleAt the recent Future of Hospitals event from Health Plus Care Online, Helen Hughes (CEO, Patient Safety Learning) Jenny Davidson (Director of Governance, King Edward VII’s Hospital) and Natasha Swinscoe (CEO, West of England AHSN) discuss some of the key current patient safety issues, challenges, and opportunities in the context the pandemic and beyond. They explore how the healthcare system has responded to COVID-19, reflecting on emerging innovations and new patient safety challenges. They consider the long-term impact of the pandemic on patient safety and on non-COVID-19 care and support.
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Content ArticleThis report brings together an elected group of experts from across international organisations, G20 Governments, the global health community and civil society to address the challenges that patients and health workers have faced and are currently facing amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. It demonstrates how the safety of patients and health workers is inexorably linked to all global health challenges, including infectious and non-communicable diseases.
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- Patient safety strategy
- Staff safety
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Content ArticleFrom infection control to maintaining safe staffing levels, the COVID-19 pandemic has helped to highlight the intrinsic link between patient safety and staff safety. At the recent Future of Hospitals event from Health Plus Care Online, Helen Hughes, Patient Safety Learning's CEO, Timothy Clark, Founder & CEO of Leader Factor, and Claire Cox, Guys and St Thomas' Hospital, explore this further, considering how ensuring staff safety supports making improvements to patient safety. They consider the essential role that creating a psychologically safe workplace plays in enabling staff to speak up and effectively tackle incidents of unsafe care.
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- Staff safety
- Mental health
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Content ArticleA toolkit for healthcare staff has been published by the National Tracheostomy Safety Project (NTSP) in collaboration with the AHSN Network and the National Patient Safety Improvement Programmes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, to support healthcare staff who are looking after patients with tracheostomies. The number of patients requiring relatively prolonged ventilatory support in intensive care units due to COVID-19 has led to increased numbers of patients requiring tracheostomies, which are used to help wean some patients from respiratory support. The toolkit provides information, practical resources and links to useful online training videos and websites. Primarily the toolkit is for hospital staff. However, much of the material is also applicable to primary and community care settings.
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Content Article
Safe Steps technology
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Community care
Safe Steps Ltd creates digital web applications for UK care homes, local authorities and NHS trusts to help reduce falls for older people and residents.- Posted
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- Innovation
- Health and Care Apps
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Content ArticleThe Health Innovation Network's Patient Safety and Experience team have been working with behavioural insights specialists to create materials based on a behavioural science approach to support frontline health and care staff to prioritise their physical health and emotional wellbeing needs that may have been neglected due to the impact of COVID-19. The campaign takes a peer to peer approach since it was found staff can struggle to identify signs of stress in themselves and are better at spotting this within colleagues.
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Content ArticleThis report from Long Covid Support summarises patient's experiences of Long Covid.
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Content ArticleAn organisational culture that seeks to assign blame when things go wrong makes patient harm more likely to happen again. At the recent Future of Hospitals event from Health Plus Care Online, Helen Hughes, Patient Safety Learning's CEO, speaks with Dr Duncan Bootland, Medical Director at Air Ambulance Kent Surrey Sussex (AAKSS), who was recently rated as outstanding by the Care Quality Commission across all five of its inspection key lines of enquiry. In this recording of the session, Helen and Duncan talk about the safety culture synergy of healthcare and aviation and how behaviour impacts on safety, considering the values-based approach being championed by AAKSS.
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- Organisational culture
- Virus
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Content ArticleThe precautionary principle is important in high risk, high harm, safety critical work. Risks to workers, customers, or service users are substantial, and so the precautionary principle in which precautions are taken until safety is proven, often apply. However, in healthcare it’s different. Healthcare takes the approach that the status quo applies until something is proven dangerous and harmful. The burden of proof is often high and often falls to the workforce to “prove.” Alison Leary, Professor of healthcare and workforce modelling at London South Bank University, in this BMJ article discusses the reasons healthcare fails to heed the precautionary principle and why potentially the cost of doing so is high and ultimately catastrophic.
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- Organisational culture
- Organisational learning
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Human factors for emergency response and critical care
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Techniques
In this blog post, Liv System’s Nigel Scard talks with Courtney Grant, a Senior Human Factors engineer with Transport for London (TfL). Nigel and Courtney worked together for a number of years at TfL on a number of station and line upgrade projects. A few years ago, Courtney applied his Human Factors and research skills with great tenacity, to a serious healthcare related incident which impacted him personally. This resulted in an important, lifesaving change to ambulance service procedures. In this interview, Courtney describes this in detail and also describes his recent work in supporting the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors (CIEHF) in supporting the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.- Posted
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- Human factors
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Content ArticleThis preprint study (not yet peer reviewed) provides further evidence on Long COVID in children. An anonymous, online survey was developed by an organisation of parents of children suffering from persisting symptoms since initial infection. Parents were asked to report signs and symptoms, physical activity and mental health issues. Only children with symptoms persisting for more than four weeks were included. Symptoms like fatigue, headache, muscle and joint pain, rashes and heart palpitations, and mental health issues like lack of concentration and short memory problems, were particularly frequent and confirm previous observations, suggesting that they may characterise this condition. Authors conclude that a better comprehension of Long COVID is urgently needed.
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- Long Covid
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Content ArticleIn this study, Mansab et al. examine the COVID-19 community triage pathways used by Singapore, Japan, USA and UK, specifically comparing the safety and efficacy of national online ‘symptom checkers’ used within the triage pathway.Their results suggest that whilst ‘symptom checkers’ may be of use to the healthcare COVID-19 response, there is the potential for such patient-led assessment tools to worsen outcomes by delaying appropriate clinical assessment. The key features of the well-performing symptom checkers are discussed in the paper.
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Content ArticleThe COVID-19 pandemic provides a stark reminder of the importance of health worker safety. Inadequate personal protection equipment (PPE) has been a problem in many settings and there have been too many examples of health workers becoming infected and dying from COVID-19.The harsh consequences of inequalities have also been laid bare by the pandemic. In countries such as the UK and USA, a disproportionate number of infections and COVID-19 deaths have occurred among Black and ethnic minority communities and people in the lowest socioeconomic groups. But what the COVID-19 pandemic has also made clear is how dependent patient safety is on health worker safety. It is crucial to highlight that there can be no patient safety without health worker safety. As in previous outbreaks of Ebola virus disease, Middle East respiratory syndrome, and severe acute respiratory syndrome, only when health workers are safe can they keep patients safe and provide health systems with stability and resilience.
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Content Article
Inside a mass vaccination centre
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Louise Cahill is clinical coordinator of a COVID-19 vaccination centre in Newport, Wales. She talks to RCN magazines about an average day and what it means to be involved in the historic immunisation programme. At the end of the article there are 10 tips for nurses talking about vaccinations to patients.- Posted
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- Vaccination
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Content ArticleThis World Health Organization (WHO) policy brief highlights areas where policy-makers can take action to meet the challenge of post-Covid conditions based on what is currently known. It addresses the need for multidisciplinary, multispecialty approaches to assessment and management; development of new care pathways and contextually appropriate guidelines for health professionals; and the creation of appropriate services, including rehabilitation and online support tools.
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Content ArticleCOVID-19 continues to have a severe effect on planned surgery in the UK, and dealing with the resulting backlog is a critical concern for the NHS. In this BMJ Editorial, Andrew Carr and colleagues look at why the waiting times have increased so much and what can be done.
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Content ArticleResearchers have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool for rapidly detecting COVID-19 in people arriving at a hospital’s emergency department. The tool can accurately rule out infection within an hour of a patient arriving at hospital, significantly faster than the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test that has a turnaround time of typically 24 hours.
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Content ArticleThe surge in the need for invasive ventilation during the covid pandemic has required the provision of intensive care beds in London to be reallocated. NHS England have proposed the formation of a Pan‐London Emergency Cardiac surgery (PLECS) service to provide urgent and emergency cardiac surgery for the whole of London. In this initial report, the Department of Cardiac Surgery, St Bartholomew's Hospital, outline their experience of setting up and delivering a pan‐regional service for the delivery of urgent and emergency cardiac surgery with a focus on maintaining a COVID‐free in‐hospital environment. In doing so, they hope that other regions can use this as a starting point in developing their own region‐specific pathways if the spread of coronavirus necessitates similar measures be put in place across the United Kingdom
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Content ArticleThis article written for The Guardian provides an inside look from the University College hospital who allowed access to its new facility and staff to show how the health service is trying to tackle backlogs.
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- Long waiting list
- Pandemic
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Content Article
Long-haulers are fighting for their future
Patient-Safety-Learning posted an article in Coronavirus (COVID-19)
This article by Ed Yong discusses the impact of Long Covid on patients and how for both unvaccinated and vaccinated people, is one of the pandemic’s biggest and least-addressed unknowns. -
Content Article
Airborne transmission of respiratory viruses
Patient-Safety-Learning posted an article in Coronavirus (COVID-19)
In this article Wang et al. review recent advances in understanding airborne transmission gained from studying the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections and other respiratory pathogens.