Mass Media Articles
This category contains resources found in mainstream media, such as newspapers, magazines (Macleans, Harper’s, etc.) and the websites of news organizations.
June 26, 2012
Summary: As patients live longer, many states, community-based coalitions, and health care providers have begun to focus on the quality—and quantity—of medical care provided at the end of life. The resulting programs have provided physicians with techniques for delivering bad news, managing transitions to palliative care, and handling requests for therapies that are likely to be futile. They’ve also helped to elicit patient preferences, leading to lower utilization in some locations.
Posted in Mass Media Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Decision making, Palliative care, Quality of care | No Comments
May 11, 2012
“The challenges of the healthcare industry today require hospitals and health systems to apply all available resources to a strategy toward reducing cost and improving quality. One of healthcare organizations’ greatest resources — and often the key to the success of new initiatives — is their employees. Attracting and retaining skilled employees necessitates a nurturing environment that encourages and rewards innovation through both material and nonmaterial benefits.
While tangible benefits, such as health insurance and compensation, are important to employee satisfaction, what may be more important are intangible benefits, such as respect and recognition. “It’s not about the money,” says Paul Spiegelman, founder and CEO of BerylHealth, a company focused on the patient experience. “People want to feel valued.” In fact, most of the following pillars of success involve abstract concepts that, while difficult to define, may ultimately separate a “good” workplace from a “great” one.”
Posted in Mass Media Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Health human resources | No Comments
April 3, 2012
This article looks at the impact of hospital gardens on patient health. “Dismissed as peripheral to medical treatment for much of the 20th century, gardens are back in style, now featured in the design of most new hospitals, according to the American Society of Landscape Architects. In a recent survey of 100 directors and architects of assisted-living residences, 82 percent agreed that “the design of outdoor space should be one of the most important considerations in the design.” But can gardens, in fact, promote healing? It turns out that they often can. Scientists around the world are now digging into the data to find out which features of gardens account for the effect.”
Posted in Mass Media Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Hospital administration, Patient satisfaction | No Comments
March 29, 2012
This article looks at the impact of employee engagement on productivity and workplace performance. The author use the fact that “organizations whose employees understand the mission and goals enjoy a 29% greater return than other firms” to show the importance of organizations creating a culture that makes employees feel valued and engaged. Further, she demonstrates the impact of poor employee engagement on a number of factors, including productivity, quality, and safety.
Posted in Mass Media Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Health human resources | No Comments
March 26, 2012
“The health of hospitalized Canadians and their visitors is being seriously put at risk by hospitals that have cut corners in cleaning budgets to save money, a Marketplace investigation has revealed.
The program took hidden cameras inside 11 hospitals in Ontario and British Columbia. What they found in many of them were surprisingly inadequate cleaning regimens – in short, dirty hospitals that could make you sick…
The program talked to cleaners, supervisors, nurses, doctors, and hospital administrators to get a handle on what has become a major problem at Canadian health-care facilities – a shocking number of hospital-acquired infections.”
Posted in Mass Media Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Canada, Prevention and control | No Comments
February 20, 2012
“An emerging category of hospital quality initiatives, comparable to preventing medical errors and improving quality and patient safety, could be labeled “waste management” or “waste reduction.” “Waste” in this sense refers not to biohazardous substances in need of disposal, but to the overuse of medical resources—such as lab tests and pharmaceuticals—when they are not helpful to a patient’s medical management.”
“If patients are getting CAT scans they don’t really need or an extra day of telemetry because we don’t have criteria for who should be on telemetry, that’s wasteful, it’s costly, and it could be dangerous,” Dr. Wachter explained at the UCSF Management of the Hospitalized Patient meeting last October. “The data are clear that 30% of what we do in American medicine is of no value to patients—and some substantial portion of that is harmful as well. I think we as hospitalists should be identifying what these wasteful things are—and making the hard decisions to stop them.”
Posted in Mass Media Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Process improvement, Quality improvement | No Comments
February 15, 2012
“Patients need much more than just medication and skilled treatment in order to get well. Attentive care demonstrably accelerates people’s recovery. Hospital architecture and the design of workplaces and patients’ rooms also play an important role – for the patient’s wellbeing, but also an efficient workflow at the hospital.
At the beginning of the year, the staff at the St. Josef Hospital and Pediatric Clinic in Neunkirchen, Germany, faced the difficult task of moving their patients and all of the medical equipment to a new hospital building. Despite all of the cost pressures, this new beginning gave planners the rare opportunity to design and configure the hospital building and wards from the ground up. Upon entering the red-and-white painted hospital facility, visitors arrive in a foyer with a waiting area containing a piano. The corridors are painted in warm shades of yellow, and the patients’ rooms are much friendlier and more comfortable than those in the previous building. The impression of being in a living room is further enhanced by curtains and movable cupboards for the patients. Even such comparatively simple measures seem to have a big effect. “The patients say that they immediately feel as though they’re in a five-star hotel,” reports Dr. Ernst Konrad, Chief Physician of the Clinic for Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine. In the intensive care units, doctors and nurses find it easier to do their work, and here too the rooms are more comfortable and colorful than those in the previous hospital building.”
Posted in Mass Media Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Hospital administration, Hospitals, Patient-centered care | No Comments
February 8, 2012
“There is a simple and effective way of getting hospital workers to wash their hands consistently: Watch them wash, and then congratulate them for having done so.
Employees at a Long Island hospital installed cameras with views of every hand-washing sink and hand sanitizer in an intensive care unit. For 16 weeks, without collecting identifying personal information, they monitored workers as they entered and left patient rooms. The results were reported last month in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.”
To read the the rest of the article visit the New York Times website. To read the original study go to the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. As this is a subscription resource, contact your institution’s librarian for information on how to access it. The full citation is:
Armellino, D., Hussain, E., Schilling, M.E., Senicola, W., Eichorn, A., Dlugacz., & Barber, B.F. (2012). Using High-Technology to Enforce Low-Technology Safety Measures: The Use of Third-party Remote Video Auditing and Real-time Feedback in Healthcare. Clinical Infectious Disease, 54(1). Available from http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/54/1/1.abstract.
Posted in Mass Media Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Prevention and control, Safety | No Comments
December 6, 2011
“A new study has a message for doctors and nurses who fail to wash their hands: Don’t think about yourself. Think about your patients.
Getting health care professionals to comply with notices to wash their hands before and after dealing with patients has been something of a thorn in the side of many hospitals. Although this simple measure limits the spread of sickness — and could potentially reduce the nation’s hospital health care bill by billions of dollars — many doctors and nurses simply ignore it. Compliance rates for hand washing in American hospitals are only around 40 percent, and years of awareness programs urging doctors to wash up or use disinfectant gels have had little effect.
Part of the problem, according to a forthcoming study in the journal Psychological Science, are the actual signs posted in hospital washrooms urging health care workers to wash up. Changing the message from “Wash Your Hands to Protect Yourself” to “Wash Your Hands to Protect Your Patients,” the study found, could motivate some doctors and nurses to wash their hands more frequently.”
The full study, titled “It’s Not All About Me: Motivating Hand Hygiene Among Health Care Professionals by Focusing on Patients” by Adam M. Grant and David A. Hofmann is available as an online release through Psychological Science. Ask your institution’s library for information on accessing the article.
Click here to read the full article
Posted in Mass Media Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Hospital administration, Prevention and control, Safety | No Comments
October 17, 2011
“Engaging physicians’ performance measurement can help improve service line margin. Effective data-driven analyses of service-line performance require:
- Buy-in and agreement at the outset from all parties (hospital and physicians) on the validity of the data used to evaluate service-line performance
- Actionable data and metrics relevant to physicians, with financial goals tangibly linked to clinical improvement
- Transparent sharing of data with physicians to build their trust and support the case for change
- A physician champion who can help validate findings and guide how data are presented
- Willingness of physicians to acknowledge that the opportunity for improved margin depends largely on the variable costs that they control as individuals”
Click here to read the full article
Posted in Mass Media Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Quality assessment, Quality improvement | No Comments
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