Each year, one out of every four hospital patients in the United States will be harmed by the care they receive. Over 400,000 will die as a result. Dr. Gretchen LeFever Watson's definitive guide empowers patients to be patient safety advocates. It takes a village to combat preventable errors and omissions that cause millions of deaths and sickness in our nation’s hospitals and care facilities. Although most of these deaths are due to human and system errors—not faulty medical decisions or diagnoses—this annual death toll—as well as the millions of additional incidents of survivable patient harm—could be cut in half through consistent use of simple and nearly cost-free safety behaviors. In Your Patient Safety Survival Guide, Gretchen LeFever Watson delivers a patient-centered blueprint on how to transform the patient-safety movement so that millions of unnecessary illnesses and deaths in hospitals, outpatient facilities, and nursing homes can be avoided. She provides key safety habits that people must learn to recognize so they can be sure hospital personnel use them during every patient encounter. She also explains how addressing the most common safety problems will set the stage for tackling a wide range of issues, including healthcare’s role in the overuse of opiate painkillers and its related heroin epidemic. Watson’s call for a more sensible societal response to medical and human error in hospitals promotes a timely and full disclosure of all mistakes—an approach that has been proven to accelerate the emotional recovery of everyone affected by patient safety events while also reducing the financial burden on hospitals, providers, and patients. Readers will learn how to: • Change behavior to catch medical errors before they result in illness or death. • Prevent the spread of dangerous infections in hospitals and other care facilities. • Leverage the power of basic safety/hygiene habits. • Eliminate mistakes during surgery and other invasive procedures. • Avoid medication errors and the overuse of opiates • Raise awareness and inspire civic action in their communities.

Gold Winner 2012 Foreword Reviews Book of The Year, Health Category The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 1.7 million people developed healthcare acquired infections in 2010. Since most people spend only a small part of their lives in healthcare facilities, this guidebook also tells readers how to avoid picking up serious infections in day care centers, schools, business offices, and other common locations. Unlike other books, which focus on how to change the hospital systems, The Patient Survival Guide focuses on empowering you with the knowledge and techniques to ensure a safer healthcare experience. The Patient Survival Guide: Inspires you to be a your own advocate Describes in vivid detail how your preparation and informed vigilance can significantly reduce the chances of harm and death to your loved one in a hospital Provides specific, practical, and outside-the-box strategies for anticipating and preventing errors, with chapters devoted to each of the most common mistakes and mishaps Provides checklists for patients to use upon admission to healthcare facilities

The book every paramedic needs to enhance their career and job performance Paramedic Survival Guide offers both novice and experienced paramedics a unique blend of case studies, testimonials, and advice from veterans to help them succeed on their jobs and advance their career. The book also offers advice on how to pick the correct EMT job, the recruitment and interview process, and various career paths and options open to paramedics. Valuable features include "Taking it to the Street" boxes detailing must-know on-the-job information.

Fifth Edition, 2013 Revision. Pulmonary Hypertension: A Patient's Survival Guide serves as a soup-to-nuts resource book covering many of the questions patients and their loved ones might have about living with pulmonary hypertension. The book (350+ pages) includes topics like the mechanics of PH, the latest treatments, patient care and lifestyle issues.

"The maxim "Primum non nocere" is almost as old as the practice of medicine. In combination with the principles of beneficence, autonomy and justice, and whilst keeping in mind the confidence and dignity of the patient, it should constitute the basis of our behaviours as physicians and nurses. Since diagnostic and therapeutic interventions have become more complex and their risk/benefit ratios more difficult to assess, the importance of safety and quality of care rises. Avoiding the infliction of harm on our patients has moved into the focus of clinical medicine"--Publisher's description.

Nurses are already nurse managers. They must manage patient caseloads and care plans as well as supervise aides, technicians, and other care providers. But moving from this type of organic management to a defined nurse manager role is not a natural progression. Nurse managers must command a vast, diverse, and robust skill set, and those skills must first be defined, explained, and operationalized for success. In an environment that offers new managers little support, where do they turn? The Nurse Manager’s Survival Guide (4th Ed.) provides an overview of a nurse manager’s major roles and responsibilities—all the fundamentals needed for success in one easy-to-use, consolidated, practical reference. From tips on building the right team to budgeting basics, time-management tools, and advice on taking care of one’s self (and their team), author Tina Marrelli supplies the resources nurse managers need to excel in day-to-day operations.

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.

"Are you prepared to deal with medical issues in a disaster or epidemic if the ambulance is heading in the OTHER direction? What if YOU were the end of the line when it came to your family's health and well-being"--Page 4 of cover.

Concise, portable, and user-friendly, The Washington Manual® of Patient Safety and Quality Improvement covers essential information in every area of this complex field. With a focus on improving systems and processes, preventing errors, and promoting transparency, this practical reference provides an overview of PS/QI fundamentals, as well as insight into how these principles apply to a variety of clinical settings. Part of the popular Washington Manual® series, this unique volume provides the knowledge and skills necessary for an effective, proactive approach to patient safety and quality improvement.

Are you a starting work in critical care? Are you an experienced nurse but need to check guidelines and best practices? This is the indispensable guide to daily procedures and problems faced by nurses working in this specialty. This book will help you to Organise your job and yourself Assess patients and communicate with them Get clinical information on a wide range of conditions What to do in emergency This UPDATED edition: Completely updated and revised content written by authors with extensive nursing experience in the field Physiological, psychological and social areas, as well as legal issues, ethical and moral dilemmas that critical care nurses and health care practitioners may face on a daily basis Boxes, tips and diagrams to help bridge the theory-practice gap while embarking on your critical care career. Part of the A Nurse’s Survival Guide series Completely updated and revised content written by authors with extensive nursing experience in the field Physiological, psychological and social areas, as well as legal issues, ethical and moral dilemmas that critical care nurses and health care practitioners may face on a daily basis Boxes, tips and diagrams to help bridge the theory-practice gap while embarking on your critical care career.