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Expert analysis of medical errors.
Some Patients Can’t Wait: Improving Timeliness of Emergency Department Care
SPOTLIGHT CASE
CE/MOC
A 46-year-old woman presented to the emergency department (ED) triage with a history of a stroke, methamphetamine use, and remote endovascular repair of a thoracic aortic dissection. Her chief complaint was abdominal pain and vomiting and she was assigned Emergency Severity Index (ESI) category 2; however, there were no available beds, so the patient remained in the waiting room. Several hours later, she began to scream in pain on the waiting room floor, was quickly assessed as needing surgery; however, surgery was delayed, and the patient died in the ED.
Right Electrocardiogram, Wrong Patient
The patient safety committee at a large tertiary care hospital received nine incident reports within three months involving electrocardiogram (EKG) reports that were uploaded into the wrong patients’ chart. All of these events were due to users failing to clear the previous patient’s information from, and/or users failing to enter the new patient’s information into, the EKG machine when obtaining an EKG.
Is that solution for IV or irrigation?: Fluid administration errors in the operating room.
Two patients admitted for deceased donor renal transplant surgery experienced similar near miss errors involving 1000 ml normal saline bags with 160mg gentamicin intended as bladder irrigation but mistakenly found spiked or next to the patient’s intravenous (IV) line. Confusion about using this nephrotoxic drug intravenously could result in significant harm to patients undergoing renal transplant surgery.
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