We’ve all heard stories about stories about relatively healthy seniors who break a bone or develop pneumonia, spiral downward, and lose their independence, or worse. Sadly, in some cases, senior patients die after seemingly minor injuries and illnesses. Unfortunately, seniors’ health is at risk both during and after hospital stays. What causes a rapid decline […]
Hospital Issues
What’s Your Hospital’s Safety Record? Is Your Hospital Safe?
We go to the hospital to seek care and treatment. Certainly, most fully expect to heal and come home better than when we went in. And no one expects to get sicker while in the hospital, but it happens. While all hospitals have policies and procedures in place to reduce a patient’s risk of harm […]
ICU Staffing Requirements
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us all the extraordinary, exhausting work performed by intensive care unit (ICU) doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals as they try to save extremely ill patients. However, as hard as these dedicated professionals work, staffing issues can put patients at risk. In fact, even before the pandemic, many patients in […]
How Common are Patient Identification Errors?
Needless to say, it would be upsetting if you were given the wrong medication because a nurse confused you with another patient. Furthermore, what if a surgeon performed a procedure on you that was meant for another patient? These types of errors are the reason health care providers check your wristband and ask for you […]
Tips for Hospital Discharges
You might feel both happy and stressed when doctors decide you (or a loved one) can go home from the hospital. You may feel joy that you will soon be home in your own bed. But you might worry that you, or your loved one, are too sick to go home. Or you might worry […]