Articles: checklist.
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Fear, anxiety, and emotional upset are common experiences for hospitalized children. To identify and treat children's emotional reactions, health care professionals must be able to differentiate emotional reactions from pain and other symptoms. Clinical assessment of emotions requires the use of valid and reliable instruments in acute care settings. ⋯ Internal consistency was better supported for the recalled unpleasant experience (α = 0.77) than for the pleasant experience (α = 0.60). Results supported construct and concurrent validity and beginning internal consistency reliability for the ERC in an acute care setting. Further research is required to establish feasibility of repeated use with ill children.
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Information loss can occur during all phases of care. The transfer of care (handoff) from the operating room to the postoperative anesthesia care unit (PACU) is an especially susceptible time. Information loss can lead to an increase in medication errors, sentinel events, and poor patient outcomes. ⋯ As the healthcare industry becomes more complex, it is in the interest of patient safety to develop, validate, and use similar objective procedures as those used in high-reliability organizations. The purpose of this research was to determine if the utilization of a formulated checklist with objective measures during the handoff from the operating room to the PACU decreased information loss, the need for information clarification, and anesthesia providers' time spent in transfer of care, with improved adequacy of the handoff. Specific metrics were monitored before and after implementation to assess for information loss, information clarification, anesthesia providers' time, and to rate the adequacy of the report.
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To compare procedure-specific checklists and a global rating scale in assessing technical competence. ⋯ Assessment using a global rating scale may be superior to assessment using a checklist for evaluation of technical competence. Traditional standard-setting methods may establish checklist cut scores with too-low specificity: High checklist scores did not rule out incompetence. The role of clinically significant errors in determining procedural competence should be further evaluated.
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The use of printed or electronic checklists and other cognitive aids has gained increasing interest from anesthesia providers and professional societies. While these aids are not currently considered standard of care, the perceptions of the clinician might have an impact on their adoption. ⋯ Providers at our large academic institution generally embrace the concept of checklists and other cognitive aids. This was true for all providers for checklists for procedural time outs, anesthesia crisis situations and those for routine procedures that providers rarely perform. Only very experienced and very junior providers appreciated the use of checklists for routine care. There remains a discrepancy between these claims and provider's perception on their clinical competency based on memory alone.