It’s a night shift, quieter than usual, though you wouldn’t say so out loud. As if the thought is enough to tempt fate, EMS rolls by. You got no patch, no heads up. “Car accident, just outside the hospital,” a paramedic calls as the patient is transferred onto the trauma stretcher. All you hear are unintelligible moans. All you see is blood streaming from a severely injured face. But the team’s already working, …
HiQuiPs: Managing Crises – What’s going on behind the scenes?
You are on-call – covering medicine and ICU admissions – while overseeing 20 admitted patients. Your wards are at capacity. You receive 3 new admissions from the ED, but you still have to move 2 sick patients to the ICU. You also have to prepare 3 discharges for the next morning. You wonder how you can best deal with the situation and help your patients. Where do you begin? How do you prioritize …
Next Generation Improvement Part 1: A Call for the Strategic Deployment of Improvement Modalities
Quality Improvement (QI) is in the middle of a “market surge”. Over the last few years, we have seen QI move from being a fad to having an established presence in academia, hospital operations, and science. A plot of Pubmed articles with the search criteria “quality improvement” OR “QI” yield a very flat slope between 1948 and 2009 (Figure 1). Since then, there has been a notable increase, going from 3200 articles to …
HiQuiPs: Expert’s Corner – Dr. Aikta Verma on Quality Improvement Leadership
HiQuiPs is back with another installment of Expert’s Corner! For this post, we had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Aikta Verma about quality improvement (QI) and quality culture in the Emergency Department (ED). Dr. Verma is the Chief of the Department of Emergency Services at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. She completed a Masters of Health Sciences in Health Administration with a specific interest in QI. She is also an Assistant Professor at …
HiQuiPs: Navigating Ethics in Quality Improvement
You have decided to start a quality improvement (QI) project on improving access to fascia iliaca nerve blocks for hip fractures in your emergency department (ED). You have also gathered an interdisciplinary team of experts within your ED to help you identify structure, process, outcome and balance measures to use in your QI project. But how can you ensure you collect your data ethically when executing this project? Welcome back to another HiQuiPs …
HiQuiPs: Sim to Win
It’s a night shift, quieter than usual, though you wouldn’t say so out loud. As if the thought is enough to tempt fate, EMS rolls by. You got no patch, no heads up. “Car accident, just outside the hospital,” a paramedic calls as the patient is transferred onto the trauma stretcher. All you hear are unintelligible moans. All you see is blood streaming from a severely injured face. But the team’s already working, …
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