Risk managers may have thought about their facilities as potential targets of terrorists, but have you ever considered that you might be the source of nuclear material used in an attack?
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If terrorists want to acquire radioactive materials in your facility, they may not do it by breaking in to the oncology department in the middle of the night. They might just pay a technician to steal the material for them, says a retired FBI agent.
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One of the best ways to thwart any attempt at stealing nuclear materials from your facility is to take seriously any report of missing material, says the president of the International Association for Healthcare Security and Safety in Glendale Heights, IL.
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A terrifying failure during general anesthesia, once thought to be so rare that it did not warrant much attention, actually is common enough that risk managers should launch a specific, focused effort at reducing the problem, known as anesthesia awareness.
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Dennis S. OLeary, MD, president of JCAHO, tells Healthcare Risk Management that risk managers should take a lead role in ensuring that all staff members are aware of the problem of anesthesia awareness.
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Anesthesia awareness is not just a problem for the anesthesia department. That was a key message of JCAHO when it issued its recent Sentinel Event Alert on the issue.
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Two hospitals in Colorado were accused of harvesting a mans organs before he was declared dead. The coroner actually ruled the death a homicide, saying the cause was removal of his internal organs by an organ recovery team. The only trouble with the story? The coroners conclusions were wrong, according to everyone involved except the coroner himself.
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The movement to prevent wrong-site or wrong-person surgery got another boost recently when a major health plan announced that on Jan. 1, 2005, it will stop paying for medical procedures involving those egregious errors.
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Los Angeles County officials reported recently that a patient at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center died after a nurse turned down an audio alarm on his vital signs monitor and then failed to notice that he was having a heart attack.
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If your nurses are so uncomfortable with the quality of the informed consent process that they dont want to sign as a witness, you should consider that a red flag that you have some serious work to do.
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In response to the national shortage of vaccine, Thomson American Health Consultants has developed an influenza sourcebook to ensure you and your hospital are prepared for what you may face this flu season.
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This case primarily deals with the issues of delay in diagnosis and delay in informing the patient of test results and the appropriate diagnosis. Communication with patients is critical and, if not handled properly, can be disastrous.
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