During the COVID-19 pandemic, hospital quality and safety scores dropped. Amit Vashist, MD, is working to rapidly fix this issue at Johnson City, Tenn.-based Ballad Health.

An uptick of confirmed leprosy cases in Florida is resparking the debate of the disease's possible connection to nine-banded armadillos, USA Today reported Oct. 3. 

"Black boxes" in operating rooms are gaining popularity as a tool to improve safety and optimize efficiency. Given their benefits in this area, there is a significant opportunity for hospitals to improve patient safety by installing them in other high-risk settings, Mary Hawn, MD, wrote in a blog published on the Association of American Medical Colleges' website Oct. 3. 

Hospitals contain many security features designed to keep unwanted threats out — think locked entrances, metal detectors, etc. — but they're less equipped to keep certain people in, says Tony Pope, vice president of the International Association for Healthcare Security and Safety.

Healthcare licenses in Illinois can take up to four to six weeks to be sent, according to The Telegraph, an Illinois-based outlet. 

Healthcare is ripe for innovation, but that innovation is less impactful if health systems can't ensure it efficiently reaches patients across the organization. That's where acing the basics comes in, says Sam Bagchi, MD, executive vice president and chief clinical officer at Christus Health. 

Some hospitals and health systems have recently implemented visitor restrictions, citing an increase of respiratory virus activity in their facilities or in the communities they serve.

Chief Nursing Officer Giancarlo Lyle-Edrosolo, DNP, RN, often scrubs in on procedures and rounds with the 3,000-plus clinicians and physicians he leads at Advocate Christ Medical Center.  

Verily, the healthcare unit of parent company Alphabet, has won its first CDC contract to support national wastewater monitoring, the company said Oct. 2. 

The FDA is warning hospitals not to give probiotics to preterm infants following the death of a baby linked to a probiotic.

Chris DeRienzo, MD, chief physician executive for the American Hospital Association, released a letter in response to a Wall Street Journal article critical of hospital preparedness to treat pediatric patients.

Only 14 percent of emergency departments nationwide are certified as ready to treat children or are children's hospitals designed to care for young people, The Wall Street Journal reported Oct. 1.

A study by researchers at New Haven, Conn.-based Yale University found four groups of people were more likely to be skipped over in emergency room lines.

The American Academy of Nursing has elected a new president and board, according to an Oct. 2 news release. 

There have been no confirmed detections of infections caused by a family of flu viruses known as Influenza B/Yamagata since March 2020, suggesting it may have been eliminated. Based on that, the World Health Organization recommends leaving it out of flu shot compositions for next year. 

Legionnaires' disease-causing bacteria was found in one area of the 303-bed Cabell Huntington (W.Va.) Hospital, NBC affiliate WSAZ reported Sept. 29.

Katalin Karikó, PhD, and Drew Weissman, MD, PhD — two Penn Medicine scientists known for their groundbreaking work on messenger RNA that laid the foundation for COVID-19 vaccines — have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. 

COVID-19 hospitalizations have fallen for the second week after the U.S. noted a slight uptick every week since July, according to CDC data. 

The number of sentinel events in 2023 is on track to be near last year's record-setting 1,441 patient safety events that led to death, harm or an intervention required to sustain life, according to The Joint Commission data first shared with Becker's.  

Transport accidents are the leading cause of death for most children while opioids and major cardiovascular disease are the most common leading cause of death for adults, according to a report from USA Facts, a nonprofit organization that conducts data analysis.