Dennis Morabito, senior manager of marketing communications at TeleTracking, spoke with Maria Romano, a TeleTracking product specialist who formerly served as the patient logistics operational manager at St. Peter’s Health Care Services in Albany, N.Y., about nurses’ role in length of stay. Ms. Romano shared seven ways nurses can help improve length of stay:
• Use checklists and other tools to ensure a patient’s discharge is completed efficiently.
• Alert case managers when a discharged patient needs transportation home.
• Assess a patient’s length of stay and diagnosis-related group to determine the cause of a discharge delay.
• Move patients from the intensive care unit to a step-down unit as soon as possible.
• Alert the necessary staff of isolation information when a patient has an infection.
• Adhere to ventilator-associated pneumonia and bloodstream infection bundles to prevent ICU infection.
• Advocate for converting IV medications to oral drugs when appropriate.
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12 Factors to Consider When Allocating Hospital Resources
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