DNV Healthcare announces it is returning full unannounced, onsite surveys as of September 7. PHE could continue through year's end.

Critical care nurses frequently did not mobilize intubated patients receiving mechanical ventilation because the patient was uncooperative, according to a new study published in American Journal of Critical Care. Competing demands from other patients or concerns about patient safety or potential adverse events also kept nurses from mobilizing intubated patients, according to Nurses’ Perceptions of Barriers to Out-of-Bed Activities Among Patients Receiving Mechanical Ventilation, which explores the mobility practices of critical care nurses in a 56-bed medical intensive care unit (MICU) at Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut. If a unit has no designated mobility team, efforts to get patients out of bed are integrated into nurses’ individual patient care responsibilities. Although all 105 patients examined in the study met early mobility criteria within eight to 173 hours after intubation, none were mobilized for out-of-bed activities.

The healthcare sector has shed 537,000 jobs since the start of the pandemic in February 2020, with hospitals accounting for 102,000 job losses, and nursing homes accounting for 360,000 job losses. Ambulatory services sector has grown 75,400 jobs in that span. There were 15.9 million people attached to the healthcare sector workforce in June, BLS said. The BLS report accounts for employment in mid-June and can be subject to considerable revision.

Find a detail-oriented person at ambulatory healthcare sites to review credentialing and privileging procedures to ensure primary source verification is carried out and that records and licenses for practitioners are not outdated. Appoint a rotating “secret shopper” among your staff to audit daily hand hygiene so you don’t lose all the progress you made on that simple infection control measure during the COVID-19 pandemic. Check and back-check vendors, maintenance contractors, or other workers performing repairs or installations that may require holes to be made in walls designed for smoke and fire protection, to ensure any openings are sealed properly.

With voluntary operations and procedures returning, huddle with your surgery and infection prevention teams to review your surgical site infection (SSI) prevention policies and best practices. More than a time to remove any rust, take this as an opportunity to tackle the second most common form of healthcare-acquired infections. Klaus Nether, executive director of high reliability product delivery at the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare, says that stopping SSIs isn’t a matter of changing a single policy, but of digging into the data to find out your specific causes. “There is not one practice or policy that has been most effective in reducing SSIs because the contributing factors are many and differ by each organization,” he says. “It depends on the contributing factors that are identified and the specific solutions that are targeted to those contributing factors. The set of contributing factors [differs] by organizations, requiring a different set of solution strategies to reduce SSIs.”

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Subscribers, download this month's full PSMJ newsletter 

Not a subscriber yet? Sign up for a Basic of Platinum membership to  gain access to all Patient Safety Monitor Journal and Inside Accreditation & Quality articles! You'll also get a a range of product offerings including Patient Safety Standards Crosswalks, an Accreditation Encyclopedia, a Career Center, CMS Compliance Crosswalk, Mock Tracer Toolkit, Accreditation Training Toolkit, webinars and more. 

Visit our Membership page to learn more and subscribe!