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If a tuberculosis patient just left your ED to go to a negative pressure room, housekeeping must come and disinfect the room wearing full contact precautions garb, leave the room unused for four hours, and remove all hanging curtains and replace these with clean ones.
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While assessing a 40-year-old male who complained of abdominal pain, nurses did a routine mental health screening, which included asking if he was currently suicidal. "He answered 'yes' to all of the questions," says MaryEllen Swanson, RN, a senior staff nurse in the ED at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis. "It would have been missed if the screening had not been done."
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Is your intubated patient being transporte d for radiological studies? This increases the chance of disastrous consequences due to an unrecognized displaced or dislodged endotracheal (ET) tube, warns Catherine Payne, RN, MSN, CCRN, CEN, an ED nurse at the University of California Davis Medical Center in Sacramento.
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If a patient reports taking antibiotics during your medication reconciliation, you may learn these were prescribed for a urinary tract infection or dental work months earlier. "For whatever reason, they didn't take the antibiotics as prescribed, and now they will take a pill whenever they have a sore throat," says Kimberly Barker, BS, RN, CEN, an ED supervisor at St. David's South Austin (TX) Medical Center.
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Just a wrist sprain? After reading this issue, you may want to look at that X-ray again.
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Care for a patient who undergoes an amputation is often complicated and is time-sensitive. A lot of thought goes into whether replantation is attempted or not, but those decisions are reserved for the replantation team. The role of the emergency provider is to expediently evaluate the patient and prepare him or her for care by the replantation team.
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Whether a claim against an emergency physician (EP) is ultimately settled, defended, or dismissed, taking an upfront approach has resulted in quicker resolution of claims, reports Ryan Domengeaux, vice-president of enterprise risk management and internal counsel for Schumacher Group, an emergency medicine practice management company in Lafayette, LA.
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Under what circumstances might a plaintiff's team be willing to drop the emergency physician (EP) involved in a lawsuit and allow the hospital to settle with the patient?
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Plaintiff attorneys continue efforts to turn ordinary "failure to diagnose" malpractice claims into claims for "failure to provide an appropriate medical screening exam" under federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act EMTALA.
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The vast majority of emergency nurses, during their entire career, will never be involved in a lawsuit, even as a witness, much less as a named defendant, according to Edie Brous, RN, Esq., a New York City-based nurse attorney. "There are many misperceptions about liability exposure," she says. "Although the fear of liability has increased, actual lawsuits, in fact, have not."
