You have recently finished a review of incidents that have been flagged in your ED. You have chosen a pertinent issue to tackle, formed a core group to work on the project, and formulated a SMART aim statement after reading our last HiQuiPs post. The median time for obtaining 12-lead ECGs is 13 minutes, while guidelines recommend less than 10 minutes.1 Your aim is to decrease the initial 12-lead ECG acquisition time by …
FLOW Hacks 6 – Improving Usage of Probenecid for Skin and Soft Tissue Infections
To continue our FLOW Hacks series, Dr. Shawn Dowling writes about his team’s innovation aimed at reducing the number of Emergency Department (ED) revisits for repeated IV antibiotic administration. Setting This intervention was carried out in all of the EDs in Calgary, Alberta. Across all four sites, there is an average of 320, 000 patient visits annually. Description of the innovation In order to reduce the number of revisits to the ED for …
HiQuiPs: Preparation Part 1 – General Considerations for ED Quality Improvement Projects
You are in the middle of a busy night shift and you see a 73-year-old female with diffuse abdominal pain who is hemodynamically stable. You have a wide differential and order a CT scan to aid in the diagnosis as you begin empiric management. Three hours pass by and the CT has not been performed. This is the third time this week that this has happened. In light of this, you feel strongly …
HiQuiPs: Quality of Care and the ED
You have just finished a busy ED shift on a warm summer evening and feel that you have been able to help a lot of people today. You plan to visit a patio and relax as you have earned it! On your way out you overhear a patient and their family members saying that they came to this ED because they heard it was “the best”, and they would never go back to …
“Patient Satisfaction” – it’s bad for everyone
Higher patient satisfaction scores are linked to increased health care costs, and higher mortality1. Pause. Take a second, and re-read that last sentence. The follow up question is obvious – why would administrators push patient satisfaction if it results in worse outcomes? This post seeks to delve into the harms of targeting patient satisfaction, why it appears to be done, and the importance of speaking to our administrators in order to advocate on …
ID Badges: You’re the who in the what now?
In every hospital I have ever worked at I have been confused about who was who at one point or another. Although it hasn’t always been verbalized, I’ve mistaken ward clerks, nurses, nursing students, medical students, residents, respiratory therapists, pharmacists, physical therapists, occupational therapists and attendings in almost every conceivable way. While it might be intuitively obvious to us that respiratory therapists wear red scrubs, medical students wear short lab coats and the …