7 Stories You Need – Prioritizing Sepsis, Shadowing Patients in Cleveland, Addressing Alarm Fatigue…

We know you’re busy, but we don’t want you to miss important healthcare quality and patient safety news. Here is a roundup of stories you may have missed but need to take a look at before calling it a week. (Sign up on the right if you’d like these news alerts delivered to you.)

1. Stepping Up Against Sepsis
   Discover how several hospitals have stepped up their games to make sepsis a top priority coordinating multidisciplinary strategies aimed at the aggressive detection and treatment of the often fatal condition.
2. Is Zero Falls the Right Target?
   Consider the proposition that working to prevent injuries from falls not only could be more realistic but even more beneficial than trying to eliminate all falls entirely.
3. Hospitals need a checklist for the patient experience
   The checklist described here is not your typical procedural inventory. This physician author recalls a set of recommendations for interacting with patients that are as relevant today as they were when they were presented to her 20 years ago.
4. Most patients don’t understand post-discharge care plans, study finds
   A  new study published in The American Journal of Surgery suggests that writing patient discharge instructions at a sixth-grade level  could help to reduce readmissions.
5. The Hidden Patient Experience
   Learn more about a patient shadowing program being launched this year at Cleveland Clinic in an effort to provide perspective and increase empathy among hospital staff.
6. At the Hospital, Better Responses to Those Beeping Alarms
   January 2016 marks the deadline that The Joint Commission set for hospitals to establish new policies and educate staff in regard to appropriate alarm management protocol. Read how some organizations are working to combat alarm fatigue.
7. Doctors and nurses need better support when they make errors
   “But while the institutional support for grieving families is a well-oiled machine, there is no such machine to mop up the tears of the staff,” writes Dr. Nina Shapiro, pediatric otolaryngologist.