OBJECTIVES Despite growing recognition of the importance of speaking up to protect patient safety in critical care, little research has been performed in this area in an intensive care unit (ICU) context. This study explored the communication openness perceptions of Chinese doctors and nurses and identified their perceptions of issues in ICU communication, their reasons for speaking up and the ...

ICU readmissions are a commonly used quality measure but despite decades of research, these adverse events continue to occur. Of particular concern is that readmitted patients have much worse prognoses than those not readmitted. In recent years new clinical service roles have evolved to assist ward staff with the care of acutely ill patients, such as those discharged from ICU. Given the recent ...

BACKGROUND Patient safety culture is an integral aspect of good standard of care. A good patient safety culture is believed to be a prerequisite for safe medical care. However, there is little evidence on whether general education can enhance patient safety culture. OBJECTIVE Our aim was to assess the impact of a standardized patient safety course on health care worker patient safety culture....

The Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is known as the department with the highest mortality numbers in any hospital. Patients at the ICU require extensive assessment by hospital staff. This is partially achieved through the use of state-oftheart monitoring devices that provide measurements and trends about each patient. This means that large amounts of useful data is available for research. With the in...

PURPOSE Keeping an ICU patient diary has been reported to benefit the patient's recovery. Here, we investigated the families' experience with reading and writing in patient ICU diaries kept by both the family and the staff. METHODS We conducted a qualitative study involving 32 semi-structured in-depth interviews of relatives of 26 patients (34% of all family members who visited patients) who ...

BACKGROUND Promoting clinical research is important considering the shortage of clinical investigators and the increasing need for large multicenter studies. Participation of clinical staff in research is crucial to achieve this goal. Our objective was to assess the research experience and interest of clinical staff working at a tertiary-care intensive care unit (ICU) and explore the perceived ...

Background: Patient flow from intensive care to acute care units is often problematic and many discharges from intensive care to acute care are unsuccessful on the first attempt. Objectives: The aim of this study was to explore the factors that influence intensive care patient discharge. Design, setting, and participants: This ethnographic study was undertaken in an Australian metropolitan tert...

INTRODUCTION The Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) is the most widely used scoring system for comatose patients in intensive care. Limitations of the GCS include the impossibility to assess the verbal score in intubated or aphasic patients, and an inconsistent inter-rater reliability. The FOUR (Full Outline of UnResponsiveness) score, a new coma scale not reliant on verbal response, was recently propose...

ICU epitomizes the critical sections of the hospital where the sickest patients are cared for. The physicians and staff in the ICU have specialized training to allow them to care for the sickest patients. By virtue of the type of patient that is cared for in the ICU, there are drugs used only and highly sophisticated pieces of equipment that are more likely to be found in the ICU. The majority ...

Optimizing healthcare delivery--improving processes to reduce impediments to care--is an important goal of the Military Health System. Models and data can be effective tools to assist managers in achieving this goal. This paper illustrates this utility with a case study of the intensive care unit (ICU) at the US Air Force's Wilford Hall Medical Center. A discrete-event simulation demonstrates h...