Hospitals and other healthcare facilities should continue to require masks against COVID-19 as always, despite new guidance to the general public.

“We know from that survey last spring that only 13% of physicians sought medical attention for mental health problems, but 30% of them cited feelings of hopelessness or having no purpose and 50% reported having inappropriate emotions. In addition, 8% of physicians reported having thoughts of self-harm as a result of COVID-19’s impact on their practices,” says Gary Price, MD, president of The Physicians Foundation.

Data from the COVID-19 pandemic has overwhelmingly highlighted the longstanding inequity in healthcare. A May 2020 study from Sutter Health researchers that analyzed 1,052 confirmed cases of COVID-19 from January 1 through April 8, 2020, determined that African American patients had 2.7 times the odds of hospitalization, after adjustment for age, sex, comorbidities, and income, than non-Hispanic white patients. The APM Research Lab reported in March that Pacific Islander, Latino, Indigenous, and African Americans have died from COVID-19 at least twice as often as white and Asian Americans. And this is just the tip of the research mounting on this disparity.

After surviving a global pandemic, will healthcare organizations double down on high reliability principles, or will they decide the costs of becoming a high reliability organization (HRO) exceed the benefits?

Vikki Choate, MSN, RN, NEA-BC, CPHQ, a healthcare consultant and international speaker with Huron Consulting Group, and Ken Rohde, senior consultant for patient safety and process improvement at The Greeley Company, are cautiously optimistic that the pandemic will encourage hospitals and clinics to invest more into building reliable systems and quality improvement projects before the next disaster strikes.

Q: What's different about the FEP intervention versus what was being done before?

Weiss: Tragically, throughout history, people experiencing psychosis received [limited] psychiatric services—maybe seeing a psychiatrist once every three months and getting some psychosocial rehab, skill building, those kinds of things. But nothing very intense in the early phases.

[That’s because] people have long thought it was just an absolute that there were going to be negative outcomes for schizophrenia spectrum disorders and that people weren't going to get better. Which is not true.

In Australia, the U.K., and Norway there are several decades of early psychosis intervention research with the goal of full recovery, especially with best practices surrounding combining multiple interventions adapted for young people first experiencing psychosis. For example, psychiatrists finding a common goal with patients on medication management, taking into account that this person may be on medication for the first time and might therefore be more sensitive to side effects. Individual psychotherapy and family supports are critical initially to help someone heal and recover from psychosis, which can often be life changing.

In case you missed it, here’s a roundup of breaking news from the Accreditation & Quality Compliance Center since Inside Accreditation & Quality was last published.

Sometimes as you get ready for survey, you just need a review of the basics. In the following excerpt from HCPro’s  Survey Coordinator’s Handbook, 21st Edition, we offer you an introduction to the concept of criticality. (To learn more about the book, by author Jodi Eisenberg, MHA, CPHQ, CPMSM, go to https://hcmarketplace.com/survey-coordinators-handbook.)

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.