Why “Benchmarking” Error Rates Is NEVER a Good Measure of Performance or Patient Safety

Problem: Organizations often want to know, in comparison to their peers, how they stand in achieving and maintaining an environment that promotes patient safety. Benchmarking is a process that can ...

Could Natural Language Processing Help Close Gaps in Infection Prevention and Patient Safety Events?

Natural language processing (NLP) is an increasingly ubiquitous form of artificial intelligence (AI). Best described as where computer science meets linguistics, it uses computational linguistics a...

How To: Safe Administration of Vaccines

​​​​​​​​Vaccinations are an important tool for building immunity to prevent illness, disability, and death resulting from infectious diseases. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Preve...

Candida Auris Cases Are on the Rise. How Can Infection Prevention Respond?

​​​​​​​​Candida auris (C. auris)—an emerging fungus considered an urgent antimicrobial resistance (AR) threat—is on the rise in the United States. According to Centers for Disease Control and Preve...

Hand Hygiene: Fundamentals to Prevent HAIs

​​​​​​​​Proper hand hygiene by healthcare workers is considered to be one of the most important practices for preventing healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) (CDC "Guideline for Hand Hygiene"). ...

Minimizing Distractions and Interruptions During Medication Safety Tasks

Problem: A distraction occurs when an individual’s attention is drawn away from one task to a different task, or when they are trying to work on multiple tasks at the same time. An interruption occ...

Building Effective Policies for Comorbidity Management

​​​​Policies for managing comorbidities, as well as multimorbidity and multiple chronic conditions, vary based on the medical conditions involved; therefore, developing a uniform policy is not nece...

10 Ways to Prevent Falls in Assisted Living Facilities

September 18 -22, 2023, marks Falls Prevention Awareness Week in the United States. Despite widespread fall prevention programs, fall incidence rates are on the rise in the United States, with an a...

10 Steps to Preventing Patient Elopement

Patient elopement is when individuals leave an area they are expected to stay within, for their safety. Elopement from a healthcare facility can have devastating consequences for a patient, includi...