Top 7 Patient Safety Monitor blog posts of 2009

I thought it’d be interesting to take a look back through 2009 and see which blog posts garnered the most page views. The following seven posts are it, and what strikes me most about this list is that it’s not completely made up of newsy announcements or write ups–the most popular blog posts were about simple solutions for keeping patients safe.

1. Uniforms by Color: Can they aid in caregiver identification?: This post brought up the idea of dressing hospital staff members in different color according to the type of job they have (nurses wear one color scrub, pharmacists wear another, physical therapists another, etc.).
2. Positive Deviance proven to lower MRSA rates: In March the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation and the Plexus Institute announced that it had research to show that using the Positive Deviance technique can lower MRSA rates. The technique involves empowering staff members to think of unique ideas to solve a problem, and giving them the resources to do so.
3. National Quality Forum endorses set of medication management measures: Earlier this year the National Quality Forum endorsed a set of 18 measures to better manage over-the-counter and prescription medications and improve the safety of using such medications. The standards focus on helping patients improve their adherence to prescription regimens.
4. New infection control product monitors hand hygiene: This post highlighted a new product that keeps tabs on staff members’ adherence to hand hygiene principles. It only works if staff members wear some sort of badge that monitors how often they wash or sanitize their hands. This post may be number four on the most read list, but if there was a list of posts that garnered the most comments, this one would top it. Some readers thought the idea was a great one, but would be too expensive to carry out. Others thought the product invaded the privacy of staff members a little too much.
5. RI hospital commits fifth wrong-site surgery since January 2007: This post detailed the wrong-site surgeries that occurred at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence between early 2007 and November 2009. After the latest offense the state’s Department of Health got involved and mandated the hospital comply with some new rules, including installing video cameras and audio recorders in its operating rooms.
6. Study examines incidence of inconsistent communication present with CPOE: The chance that an error may occur as the result of a discrepancy between the open notes field in a CPOE system and the actual CPOE order was examined in a study published earlier this year in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Researchers found that while the errors were uncommon, they do occur and some can be serious.
7. How does your hospital color-code patient wristbands? This post brought to light the many groups out there within specific states, or even regions of states, that all denote different colors for patient wristbands to mean different things. There are many coalitions that have been successful in standardizing these colors.