BMJ quality & safety
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BMJ quality & safety · Sep 2013
The Housestaff Incentive Program: improving the timeliness and quality of discharge summaries by engaging residents in quality improvement.
Quality improvement has become increasingly important in the practice of medicine; however, engaging residents in meaningful projects within the demanding training environment remains challenging. ⋯ Our discharge summary improvement project provides an instructive example of how residents can lead clinically meaningful quality improvement projects.
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BMJ quality & safety · Nov 2013
Implementing an interprofessional patient safety learning initiative: insights from participants, project leads and steering committee members.
Effective teamwork and interprofessional collaboration are vital for healthcare quality and safety; however, challenges persist in creating interprofessional teamwork and resilient professional teams. A study was undertaken to delineate perceptions of individuals involved with the implementation of an interprofessional patient safety competency-based intervention and intervention participants. ⋯ Our findings point to leaders to provide opportunities for healthcare teams to engage in interprofessional teamwork and patient safety projects to improve quality of patient care. Further research efforts should examine the sustainability of interprofessional safety projects and how leaders can more fully engage the participation of all professions, specifically physicians.
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BMJ quality & safety · Dec 2012
Removal of doctors from practice for professional misconduct in Australia and New Zealand.
To examine how disciplinary tribunals assess different forms of misconduct in deciding whether to remove doctors from practice for professional misconduct. ⋯ Tribunals in Australia and New Zealand tend to remove doctors from practice for behaviours indicative of character flaws and lack of insight, rather than behaviours exhibiting errors in care delivery, poor clinical judgement or lack of knowledge. The generalisability of these findings to regulatory regimes for health practitioners in other countries should be tested.
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BMJ quality & safety · Oct 2012
Anaesthetic drug administration as a potential contributor to healthcare-associated infections: a prospective simulation-based evaluation of aseptic techniques in the administration of anaesthetic drugs.
To evaluate the possibility that anaesthetists are administering potentially pathogenic micro-organisms to their patients. ⋯ The administration of intravenous drugs during anaesthesia may be an important factor in the genesis (or potentially the prevention) of healthcare-associated infection. These observations suggest room for improvement in the aseptic techniques of at least some anaesthetists when preparing and administering intravenous drugs. Confirmation of these findings in clinical settings is needed. STUDY REGISTRY NUMBER (FOR THE VASER STUDY): Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry: Ref: ACTRN 12609000530224, https://www.anzctr.org.au/registry/trial_review.aspx?ID=308128; note that the work presented here is a subset of the registered trial and its outcomes were not included in this registration.
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BMJ quality & safety · Apr 2013
Do you have to re-examine to reconsider your diagnosis? Checklists and cardiac exam.
Few studies have investigated whether clinicians can use checklists to verify their diagnostic decisions. Checklists may improve accuracy by prompting clinicians to reconsider or recollect information but might impair decision making by adding to clinicians' cognitive load. This study assessed whether checklists improve cardiac exam diagnostic accuracy, and whether this benefit is dependent on collecting additional information. ⋯ Verifying diagnostic decisions with a checklist improved diagnostic accuracy. This benefit was only seen when more information could be collected. Checklist use was not associated with increased cognitive load.