Be sure to review any federal 1135 blanket waivers against your state's requirements to make sure you've met compliance expectations. 

CMS pre-published an interim final rule today that sets COVID-19 vaccine requirements for long-term care (LTC) facilities, and is seeking comment to expand the rules to other types of providers.

Although observations showed a 90% hand hygiene compliance across the health system where he is director of quality, Bill Cox, RN, CPPS, CPHQ, was skeptical. “I would say, ‘How are we at 90% when I see many gaps across the 15 hospitals?’ ” he says. Cox decided to trial a cloud-based electronic hand hygiene monitoring network in which badges with sensors communicate to the network when a user enters and exits a patient room and records whether the user cleans their hands.

Many studies have shown the benefits of certain medications for improving long-term outcomes in patients with chronic conditions. However, even when evidence-based recommendations are closely followed, there is a potential for adverse consequences because of the concurrent use of multiple medications. Such consequences include the following (Maher et al., 2014):

• Increased likelihood of an adverse event due to a single drug
• Harmful interactions between drugs
• Increased healthcare costs
• Nonadherence to medication regimens
• Functional decline
• Cognitive impairment
• Falls
• Malnutrition
• Urinary incontinence

As the population has aged and mortality rates have declined, these adverse consequences are challenging to clinicians treating older adults in particular, because of the increased prevalence of multimorbidity (i.e., the coexistence of two or more chronic health conditions) (Salive, 2013). Older patients are also more vulnerable to the adverse effects of medications because of age-associated physiological changes, including decreased renal and hepatic function, decreased lean body mass and total body water content, and declining vision and hearing (Bushardt et al., 2008).

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic began, critical care nurses (CCN) were experiencing alarmingly high levels of stress, anxiety, depression, and poor physical health—factors that correlated with an increase in self-reported medical errors, according to a new study by The Ohio State University College of Nursing.

Nearly two-thirds (60.9%) of the CCNs reported having made medical errors in the past five years, according to the study. Occurrence of medical errors was significantly higher among nurses in worse health than those in the bet­ter health categories. For example, 67% of the nurses with higher stress scores versus 56.5% of the nurses with no or little stress reported having made medi­cal errors in the past five years.

However, critical care nurses whose organizations put strong emphasis on their well-being are more likely to be fully engaged in patient care and make fewer medical errors, according to lead author Bernadette Melnyk, chief wellness officer and dean of Ohio State’s College of Nursing.

Accurate estimates of deaths from preventable medical errors in U.S. hospitals vary widely because of inconsistent reporting methods: