Healthcare Safety

PURPOSE: Individuals with psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES) can be stigmatized in healthcare settings. We aimed to compare intervention rate (IR), intervention time (IT), and adverse event (AE) rate between PNES and epileptic seizures (ES) in the epilepsy monitoring unit (EMU). METHODS: We used a prospective database of consecutive admissions to our centre's EMU between August 2021 and September 2022. We excluded purely electric seizures and vague, minor spells with no EEG correlate...

BACKGROUND: One of the common concerns of healthcare systems is the potential for re-admission of COVID-19 patients. In addition to adding costs to the healthcare system, re-admissions also endanger patient safety. Recognizing the factors that influence re-admission, can help provide appropriate and optimal health care. The aim of this study was to assess comorbidities that affect re-admission and survival in COVID-19 patients using a joint frailty model. METHODS: This historical cohort study was done using data of patients with COVID-19 who were re-hospitalized more than twice in a referral hospital in North of Iran...

Nursing home residents are at increased risk for developing severe COVID-19. Nursing homes report weekly facility-level data on SARS-CoV-2 infections, COVID-19-associated hospitalizations, and COVID-19 vaccination coverage among residents to CDC's National Healthcare Safety Network. This analysis describes rates of incident SARS-CoV-2 infection, rates of incident COVID-19-associated hospitalization, and COVID-19 vaccination coverage during October 16, 2023-February 11, 2024. Weekly rates of SARS-CoV-2 infection ranged from 61...

As medical safety and drug regulation gain heightened attention, the detection of spurious drug-drug interactions (DDI) has become key in healthcare. Although current research using graph neural networks (GNNs) to predict DDI has shown impressive results, it often fails to account for false DDI in the constructed DDI networks. Such inaccuracies caused by data errors, false alarms, or incorrect drug details can skew the network's structure and hinder the accuracy of GNN-based predictions. To tackle this challenge, we propose ANSM, a network-enhancement method specifically designed to identify and attenuate spurious links between drugs for ensuring the accuracy of DDI networks...

BACKGROUND: Bisphosphonates are a class of medication commonly used to treat osteoporosis. Alendronate is recommended as the first-line treatment; however, long-term adherence (both treatment compliance and persistence) is poor. Alternative bisphosphonates are available, which can be given intravenously and have been shown to improve long-term adherence. However, the most clinically effective and cost-effective alternative bisphosphonate regimen remains unclear. What is the most cost-effective bisphosphonate in clinical trials may not be the most cost-effective or acceptable to patients in everyday clinical practice...

Background Handoffs between medical providers serve a crucial patient safety function. While most published literature on the topic studies the handover process among physicians, robust literature is available on interdisciplinary medical communication. Little is known about the downstream effects of effective physician handover on subsequent physician and nursing interactions. Objective Our objective was to implement a handoff curriculum, SAFETIPS (Statistics, Assessment, Focused plan, pertinent Exam findings, To dos, If/thens, Pointers/pitfalls, and Severity of illness), for pediatric residents and to investigate its impact on nurses' perceptions of resident preparedness, efficiency, and competency...

OBJECTIVE: Many healthcare workers (HCWs) hesitated or refused to receive the COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic. The attitudes of HCWs toward vaccines have an impact on society and patients. In this study, we aimed to investigate the reasons for vaccine hesitancy and refusal among HCWs during the COVID pandemic. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We planned a two-step descriptive survey study. In the first step, we surveyed the unvaccinated HCWs in our hospital face-to-face after the first vaccination program...

INTRODUCTION: Despite the Veterans Health Administration (VA) efforts to become a learning health system (LHS) and high-reliability organization (HRO), interventions to build supportive learning environments within teams are not reliably implemented, contributing to high levels of burnout, turnover, and variation in care. Supportive learning environments build capabilities for teaching and learning, empower teams to safely trial and adapt new things, and adopt highly reliable work practices (eg, debriefs)...

The U.S. COVID-19 vaccination program, which commenced in December 2020, has been instrumental in preventing morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 disease. Safety monitoring has been an essential component of the program. The federal government undertook a comprehensive and coordinated approach to implement complementary safety monitoring systems and to communicate findings in a timely and transparent way to healthcare providers, policymakers, and the public. Monitoring involved both well-established and newly developed systems that relied on both spontaneous (passive) and active surveillance methods...

BACKGROUND: Overuse of medical care is a pervasive problem. Studies using hypothetical scenarios suggest that physicians' risk literacy influences medical decisions; real-world correlations, however, are lacking. We sought to determine the association between physicians' risk literacy and their real-world prescriptions of potentially hazardous drugs, accounting for conflicts of interest and perceptions of benefit-harm ratios in low-value prescribing scenarios. SETTING AND SAMPLE: Cross-sectional study-conducted online between June and October 2023 via field panels of Sermo (Hamburg, Germany)-with a convenience sample of 304 English general practitioners (GPs)...

OBJECTIVES: Potentially harmful non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) utilisation persists at undesirable rates worldwide. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on interventions to de-implement potentially harmful NSAIDs in healthcare settings and to suggest directions for future research. DESIGN: Scoping review. DATA SOURCES: PubMed, CINAHL, Embase, Cochrane Central and Google Scholar (1 January 2000 to 31 May 2022)...

A long history of policymaking and regulation constructed for the purpose of ensuring adequate fetal and infant protections has inadvertently sanctioned the widespread exclusion of pregnant and lactating patients from biomedical research, leaving a paucity of high quality data necessary for clinical decision-making. Although well-intended, the regulatory classification of pregnant women as "vulnerable", in conjunction with burdensome enrollment criteria and other factors weighing against broad inclusion, have ultimately placed the health and safety of these women and their babies in jeopardy...

The rapid developments in the field of zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs) in recent years have created unparalleled opportunities for the development of unique bioactive ZIFs for a range of biosensor applications. Integrating bioactive molecules such as DNA, aptamers, and antibodies into ZIFs to create bioactive ZIF composites has attracted great interest. Bioactive ZIF composites have been developed that combine the multiple functions of bioactive molecules with the superior chemical and physical properties of ZIFs...

BACKGROUND: To date, there are no studies investigating the safety and outcomes of facial feminization surgery (FFS) as an outpatient procedure. This is the first study of its kind analyzing the outcomes of ambulatory FFS based on a comparison of complications, post-operative emergency department or urgent care (ED/UC) visits, and readmissions between patients who underwent FFS with admission versus same-day surgery. METHODS: A retrospective analysis was conducted on all patients who underwent FFS in a single integrated healthcare system...

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has sharpened the focus on health care safety and quality, underscoring the importance of using standardized metrics such as the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10). In this regard, the ICD-10 cluster Y62-Y69 serves as a proxy assessment of safety and quality in health care systems, allowing researchers to evaluate medical misadventures. Thus far, extensive research and reports support the need for more attention to safety and quality in health care...

Wrong dose calculation medication errors are widespread in pediatric patients mainly due to weight-based dosing. PediPain app is a clinical decision support tool that provides weight- and age- based dosages for various analgesics. We hypothesized that the use of a clinical decision support tool, the PediPain app versus pocket calculators for calculating pain medication dosages in children reduces the incidence of wrong dosage calculations and shortens the time taken for calculations. The study was a randomised controlled trial comparing the PediPain app vs...

BACKGROUND: Healthcare workers (HCWs) in lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs) face unique, intersectional threats to their mental health at work. Despite the existence of recommendations for multi-tiered interventions to promote and protect occupational mental health for HCWs, there remain significant challenges to implementation worldwide. METHODS: FHI 360, a global development organization, developed a novel technical assistance framework to accompany partners, including government and healthcare leaders to design, implement, improve, or evaluate any mental health and psychosocial support intervention...

INTRODUCTION: Although stem cell research and therapeutic applications hold great promise for medical advancements, and have rapidly progressed globally, there remains a lack of genuine public awareness of the status of this subject in Saudi Arabia. Successful integration of stem cell therapy into healthcare relies on public awareness, understanding, and trust. Therefore, we aimed in this cross-sectional study to assess the public's knowledge, awareness, trust, support, participation, and confidence in stem cell treatments and centers involved in it...

Integrating healthcare into traffic accident prevention through predictive modeling holds immense potential. Decentralized Defense presents a transformative vision for combating cyberbullying, prioritizing user privacy, fostering a safer online environment, and offering valuable insights for both healthcare and predictive modeling applications. As cyberbullying proliferates in social media, a pressing need exists for a robust and innovative solution that ensures user safety in the cyberspace. This paper aims toward introducing the approach of merging Blockchain and Federated Learning (FL), to create a decentralized AI solutions for cyberbullying...

In intensive care units, patients are often restrained to ensure their safety, with physical restraints being the most commonly used method. However, physical restraints compromises the patient's freedom, health and comfort, and nurses often face moral dilemmas when deciding whether to use physical restraints. This article examines physical restraints through the four universal principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice. Through these principles, the authors will critically explore whether the physical restraints of patients by nurses is ethical in practice and what moral issues exist...