quality

Relocation: The key considerations to tackle

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Some people will live in the same place, or even the same house, for their entire lives. Then, you have free spirits, those who like to roam about from city to city every year. In between the above groups, there are some people who are forced to uproot their life and relocate. Generally speaking, this tends to be for work, but there can also be reasons related to family which make it a necessity. If you have are considering relocating in the past, the below will offer you some of the big things to consider ahead of your move. Location, location, location Granted, you may have decided on your new destination of choice, but your next choice revolves around the city, or even the neighborhood that you will be heading to. Contrary to popular belief, this isn’t just about crime … Read more

Quality Measures Need Measures of Quality

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An article titled “Quality Measures Need Measures of Quality” appears in the 2016 Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, issue 74, pp. 1101-1102, and written by Thomas Dodson. The article discusses how nowadays doctors have a lot more access to information thanks to the information technology revolution. He discusses HIPAA and electronic medical records (EMRs). The author states “EMRs were introduced—we were promised—to make patient information portable and to improve communication between providers, thus improving patient safety and quality of care. In truth, these were secondary intentions, the first and overriding being Medicare’s (now CMS’) need to provide comparable data across institutions in order to control costs and monitor utilization.” In the article he talks about compliance with data capture and automation and how with quality measures oral surgeons are not much farther now than in 1984. Measures of quality, … Read more

Dental Anxiety Associates with Pain During Dental Procedures

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It is well known by dentists that some patients experience dental anxiety, with some patients have worse dental anxiety than others. In a review article titled “Dental Anxiety Is Considerably Associated With Pain Experience During Dental Procedures,” by Mike T. John, appearing in J Evid Base Dent Pract, 2013, issue 13, pp. 29-30, the issue of dental anxiety in dental patients is explored. The study reviews a study titled “Predictors of pain associated with routine procedures performed in general dental practice,” by Tickle M, Milsom K, Crawford FI, and Aggarwal VR, in Community Dent Oral Epidemiol, 2012 Aug;40(4):343-50. In the original study 508 patients who visit 38 different dentists in England participate. Dental anxiety was measured with the Corah Dental Anxiety Scale which resulted in a score between 4 and 20. This score was grouped into 4 different variables representing … Read more

Patient Safety and the Culture of Cover-Up

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An interesting article was written by George Lundberg titled “A culture of cover-up has slowed the patient safety movement” on December 1, 2012, on KevinMd.com located at http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2012/12/culture-coverup-slowed-patient-safety-movement.html. In the article Dr. Lundberg says “Promoting patient safety, preventing medical error, preventing physician error, preventing errors in diagnosis, preventing nurse error, preventing surgical error, preventing communication error, preventing health illiteracy error, preventing errors from language barriers, preventing laboratory error, preventing computer error, preventing patient mix-ups, preventing right and left side of body mix-ups, preventing mistakes, since mistakes are the stepping stones to failure. Recognizing human frailty, recognizing physician humanity, recognizing system fallibility, owning up to problems, eliminating cover-up, acting out professionalism, recognizing that professionalism means self governance, individually and as groups. Self criticism, peer criticism, a culture of peer review, honesty, truth, disclosure, fairness, and negotiated settlements. Objective evaluation and commitment … Read more

Unsafe Injection Practices Plaque U.S. Outpatient Facilities

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In a post last year I discussed how an Oral Surgeon Investigated for Reusing Needles and Syringes. In a recent article in JAMA titled “Unsafe Injection Practices Plague US Outpatient Facilities, Harm Patients,” Bridget M. Kuehn discusses many problems with injection practices (December 26, 2012,Vol 308, No. 24, pp. 2551-2552). She describes how hepatitis C virus was contracted by 2 patients who received an epidural injection from a pain management clinic. “During the visit, they observed the physician who treated both patients withdrawing medication from a multiple-dose vial with a previously used syringe topped with a new needle, a breach of safe injection practices that may have contaminated the vial and exposed subsequent patients to potential blood-borne infections.” This led to 8,000 patients who were treated at the clinic to be tested and 8 additional cases of hepatis C to … Read more