Patient Safety & Outcomes

Sept. 17 is World Patient Safety Day — a campaign established by the World Health Organization in 2019 to raise awareness about adverse patient safety events. 

While many physicians are reporting an uptick in children requiring hospitalization for COVID-19, researchers say it's still unclear whether the delta variant is causing more severe infections, NBC News reported Sept. 16. 

The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare activated crisis standards of care Sept. 16 for all hospitals and health systems across the state. 

The CDC released a new toolkit for payers that empowers them to provide feedback to providers on outpatient antibiotic prescriptions and improve use. 

The federal government can play an influential role in reducing racial disparities in maternal health outcomes, according to a Sept. 15 report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.  

Anchorage-based Providence Alaska Medical Center, the state's largest hospital, has activated crisis standards of care for the hospital, which is facing a shortage of staff and other resources amid the latest COVID-19 surge.

Hospitals across the U.S., particularly in the South, are running low on intensive care unit beds as the delta variant drives COVID-19 surges, The New York Times reported.

Relative to vaccinated people, those who are unvaccinated and infected with COVID-19 face a 10 times higher risk of hospitalization and are 11 times more likely to die from the disease, the CDC's Sept. 10 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report…

Health officials in New Mexico are investigating the state's first suspected case of fatal poisoning from ivermectin after a person self-administered the drug, USA Today reported Sept. 10. 

Many hospitals in the South are short on staff members trained to provide extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, a last-resort therapy for severely ill COVID-19 patients, Kaiser Health News reported Sept. 10.