Medical emergencies evoke images of the hospital emergency department or emergency medical personnel responding in the community. But medical emergencies can occur anywhere, including in office and clinic settings—and sometimes those emergencies involve medications. In this episode, Dr. Kelley Shultz describes challenges in responding to emergencies in the office setting and steps they can take to prevent emergencies and respond when they do occur.

In this episode, we talk about how healthcare practitioners give medicine through a vein, and a way that healthcare organizations can make it safer for patients. We’ll discuss why ready-to-administer medications are safer, and what patients, caregivers, and healthcare workers should know. You can find ISMP’s Safe Practice Guidelines for Adult IV Push Medications at https://home.ecri.org/blogs/ismp-resources/safe-practice-guidelines-for-adult-iv-push-medications.

This episode is made possible through an education grant from Fresenius Kabi.

As the school year is winding down, children across the nation are getting ready to attend summer camps. Many of them will need prescription and over-the-counter medications while they’re at camp, away from their parents and primary care providers. If camps aren’t ready to manage the responsibilities of storing and managing those meds, their campers could be at risk. In this episode, Randi Trope, D.O., Vice Chair of Pediatric Quality & Safety, Stony Brook Children's Hospital in New York and a member of the advisory board for the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP), and Jen Young, PharmD, BCPS, CSP, a pharmacist and medication safety specialist at ISMP, describe safety tips for camp operators, pharmacists, and families.

To see more camp safety guidance from ISMP, see https://www.consumermedsafety.org; learn more about ISMP’s medication safety work at www.ISMP.org.

The idea of the “five rights” for medication safety has been taught in nursing school since at least World War II, used as a memory tool that nurses should rely on to administer medications safely. Even though no one can identify where the five rights came from, the idea is embedded in medication safety programs and appears frequently in error reports submitted to ECRI and the ISMP Patient Safety Organization.

As our guest Susan Paparella, Vice President, Services, Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP), points out, the five rights are inadequate as a safety tool. Because they do not address the system-level errors that contribute to medication errors, those errors can occur even when the five rights have been followed. In the latest episode, we discuss more about the shortcomings of the five rights, and better starting points for medication safety programs.

Learn more about ISMP and the ECRI-ISMP Medication Safety memberships.

In this episode, Tim Gibson, Senior Manager, Functional Equivalents, and Andy Poole, Associate Director, Strategy and Innovation, ECRI, describe strategies for enhancing the supply management process in non-acute organizations like nursing homes, ambulatory surgery centers, and physician practices. They describe the importance of building a robust data set and dedicating real staff time to this care-critical activity.

In the latest episode of our podcast, we speak to Karen Garvey, Vice President, Safety and Clinical Risk Management, and J.D. Buchert, Workplace Safety Manager, Parkland Health (Dallas, Texas). They describe their data-driven approach to identifying and combatting workplace violence, including the importance of keeping frontline staff involved in and aware of those efforts.

In this episode, we talk with nurse leaders from Allegheny Health Network (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) about their innovative blended staffing model that encourages LPNs to return to acute care, along with other programs to help bolster staffing, like incentivizing nurses who have left the workforce to return to practice.

Providing equitable care for a diverse population requires providers to meet patients where they are—including if they are experiencing homelessness. In this episode, Dr. Jose Ramos, of Pomona Valley Health Centers, describes his team’s outreach efforts to homeless individuals, how those efforts were affected by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and strategies for implementing similar programs elsewhere.

In this episode, our guest, Emily Transue, MD, MHA, FACP, Medical Director for the Washington State Health Care Authority (HCA), discusses how shared decision-making can be more than a tool to engage patients in their care, and can also help in the fight against care inequities and disparities.

In this episode, we talk with our guest, Tom McCormick, Vice President, Patient Accounting, at Penn Medicine, about adjusting staffing patterns in the patient accounting department during the COVID-19 pandemic. He shares his perspective on how staff roles changed, how the shift to remote work had expected and unexpected effects, and how all of it tied back to providing for patient and staff safety.