Healthcare ethics help guide and influence the way physicians, nurses, and other members of the healthcare team care for patients and make decisions. Ethics address the moral dilemmas that arise out of conflicts with duties or obligations as well as the consequences of decision-making. As healthcare has continued to grow and evolve, so has the way healthcare ethics are handled. Nurses are uniquely positioned to serve as leaders in healthcare ethics because they are intricately involved in all aspects of patient care, including care coordination, recommendations for plans of care, provision of life-sustaining interventions, and patient education. The Nurse’s Healthcare Ethics Committee Handbook focuses on a nurse-led ethics consultative service. Authors Angeline Dewey and Andrea Holecek provide tools that nursing students, professionals, administrators, and other members of the healthcare team need to develop infrastructure and processes that support nurses in an ethics committee leadership role. Filled with real-life scenarios, this book outlines a step-by-step process for nurses to evaluate ethical cases and the risks involved

Get the knowledge needed to serve as an effective Medical Executive Committee Member and fulfill the role well. The MEC Essentials Handbook breaks down the medical executive committee role to facilitate understanding of the responsibilities and strategies for being an exemplary committee member. Oftentimes physicians end up in a leadership position without really knowing what the job entails and what they are meant to accomplish. This handbook can be used as a comprehensive guide for physician leaders throughout their appointment, providing them with the necessary skills and knowledge they may not have received as part of their medical school training and residency. Plus, to make staff training easy, this handbook includes a customizable PowerPoint(R) presentation highlighting key takeaways covered in the handbook. Benefits of The MEC Essentials Handbook: Earn CE and certification credits Assess, document, and comply with The Joint Commission's core competencies Verify the competence of advance practice professionals and allied health professionals Understand the role of physician leaders in focused professional practice evaluation (FPPE), ongoing professional practice evaluation (OPPE), and peer review Overcome challenges presented by low- and no-volume providers and legal issues such as negligent credentialing Avoid costly, time-consuming fair hearings Oversee professional conduct and confront disruptive behavior What's inside: Compare and contrast the roles and responsibilities of the medical staff, management, and board Describe the dimensions of physician performance Explain the role of MEC as oversight for the credentialing and privileging committee Explain the role of MEC as oversight for the peer review, quality, and patient safety committees Describe the MEC's role in overseeing disruptive physician behavior, according to the law and Joint Commission standards Identify the seven factors of successful medical staff development planning Derive strategies to streamline MEC meetings Table of Contents Chapter 1: Roles and responsibilities of the medical staff, management, and board Chapter 2: The Power of the Pyramid: How to achieve great physician performance Chapter 3: The MEC's role in credentialing and privileging Chapter 4: The MEC's role in peer review, quality, and patient safety Chapter 5: The MEC's role in managing professional conduct Chapter 6: The MEC's role in strategic collaboration with the hospital Chapter 7: Effective MEC meetings

Examines the newest scientific advances in the science of safety.

Experts estimate that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. That's more than die from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDSâ€"three causes that receive far more public attention. Indeed, more people die annually from medication errors than from workplace injuries. Add the financial cost to the human tragedy, and medical error easily rises to the top ranks of urgent, widespread public problems. To Err Is Human breaks the silence that has surrounded medical errors and their consequenceâ€"but not by pointing fingers at caring health care professionals who make honest mistakes. After all, to err is human. Instead, this book sets forth a national agendaâ€"with state and local implicationsâ€"for reducing medical errors and improving patient safety through the design of a safer health system. This volume reveals the often startling statistics of medical error and the disparity between the incidence of error and public perception of it, given many patients' expectations that the medical profession always performs perfectly. A careful examination is made of how the surrounding forces of legislation, regulation, and market activity influence the quality of care provided by health care organizations and then looks at their handling of medical mistakes. Using a detailed case study, the book reviews the current understanding of why these mistakes happen. A key theme is that legitimate liability concerns discourage reporting of errorsâ€"which begs the question, "How can we learn from our mistakes?" Balancing regulatory versus market-based initiatives and public versus private efforts, the Institute of Medicine presents wide-ranging recommendations for improving patient safety, in the areas of leadership, improved data collection and analysis, and development of effective systems at the level of direct patient care. To Err Is Human asserts that the problem is not bad people in health careâ€"it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer. Comprehensive and straightforward, this book offers a clear prescription for raising the level of patient safety in American health care. It also explains how patients themselves can influence the quality of care that they receive once they check into the hospital. This book will be vitally important to federal, state, and local health policy makers and regulators, health professional licensing officials, hospital administrators, medical educators and students, health caregivers, health journalists, patient advocatesâ€"as well as patients themselves. First in a series of publications from the Quality of Health Care in America, a project initiated by the Institute of Medicine

"Nurses play a vital role in improving the safety and quality of patient car -- not only in the hospital or ambulatory treatment facility, but also of community-based care and the care performed by family members. Nurses need know what proven techniques and interventions they can use to enhance patient outcomes. To address this need, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), with additional funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has prepared this comprehensive, 1,400-page, handbook for nurses on patient safety and quality -- Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses. (AHRQ Publication No. 08-0043)." - online AHRQ blurb, http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/nurseshdbk/

This unique and engaging open access title provides a compelling and ground-breaking account of the patient safety movement in the United States, told from the perspective of one of its most prominent leaders, and arguably the movement’s founder, Lucian L. Leape, MD. Covering the growth of the field from the late 1980s to 2015, Dr. Leape details the developments, actors, organizations, research, and policy-making activities that marked the evolution and major advances of patient safety in this time span. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, this book not only comprehensively details how and why human and systems errors too often occur in the process of providing health care, it also promotes an in-depth understanding of the principles and practices of patient safety, including how they were influenced by today’s modern safety sciences and systems theory and design. Indeed, the book emphasizes how the growing awareness of systems-design thinking and the self-education and commitment to improving patient safety, by not only Dr. Leape but a wide range of other clinicians and health executives from both the private and public sectors, all converged to drive forward the patient safety movement in the US. Making Healthcare Safe is divided into four parts: I. In the Beginning describes the research and theory that defined patient safety and the early initiatives to enhance it. II. Institutional Responses tells the stories of the efforts of the major organizations that began to apply the new concepts and make patient safety a reality. Most of these stories have not been previously told, so this account becomes their histories as well. III. Getting to Work provides in-depth analyses of four key issues that cut across disciplinary lines impacting patient safety which required special attention. IV. Creating a Culture of Safety looks to the future, marshalling the best thinking about what it will take to achieve the safe care we all deserve. Captivatingly written with an “insider’s” tone and a major contribution to the clinical literature, this title will be of immense value to health care professionals, to students in a range of academic disciplines, to medical trainees, to health administrators, to policymakers and even to lay readers with an interest in patient safety and in the critical quest to create safe care.

Medical and health activities can greatly benefit from the effective use of health informatics. By capturing, processing, and disseminating information to the correct systems and processes, decision-making can be more successful and quality care and patient safety would see significant improvements. The Handbook of Research on Patient Safety and Quality Care through Health Informatics highlights current research and trends from both professionals and researchers on health informatics as applied to the needs of patient safety and quality care. Bringing together theory and practical approaches for patient needs, this book is essential for educators and trainers at multiple experience levels in the fields of medicine and medical informatics.

Building on the revolutionary Institute of Medicine reports To Err is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm, Keeping Patients Safe lays out guidelines for improving patient safety by changing nurses' working conditions and demands. Licensed nurses and unlicensed nursing assistants are critical participants in our national effort to protect patients from health care errors. The nature of the activities nurses typically perform â€" monitoring patients, educating home caretakers, performing treatments, and rescuing patients who are in crisis â€" provides an indispensable resource in detecting and remedying error-producing defects in the U.S. health care system. During the past two decades, substantial changes have been made in the organization and delivery of health care â€" and consequently in the job description and work environment of nurses. As patients are increasingly cared for as outpatients, nurses in hospitals and nursing homes deal with greater severity of illness. Problems in management practices, employee deployment, work and workspace design, and the basic safety culture of health care organizations place patients at further risk. This newest edition in the groundbreaking Institute of Medicine Quality Chasm series discusses the key aspects of the work environment for nurses and reviews the potential improvements in working conditions that are likely to have an impact on patient safety.

Written for virtually every professional and leader in the health care field, as well as students who are preparing for careers in health services delivery, this book presents a framework for developing a patient safety program, shows how best to examine events that do occur, and reveals how to ensure that appropriate corrective and preventative actions are reviewed for effectiveness. The book covers a comprehensive selection of topics including The link between patient safety and legal and regulatory compliance The role of accreditation and standard-setting organizations in patient safety Failure modes and effect analysis Voluntary and regulatory oversight of medical error Evidence-based outcomes and standards of care Creation and preservation of reports, data, and device evidence in medical error situations Claims management when dealing with patient safety events Full disclosure Patient safety in human research Managing confidentiality in the face of litigation Managing patient safety compliance through accountability-based credentialing for health care professionals Planning for the future