Can the Healthcare System Improve Food Security? A Need for Collaborative Community Partnerships.

The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the food insecurity crisis in Canada, and existing supports have been largely insufficient to meet the food needs of communities. In response to increasing reports of food insecurity among Toronto residents during the pandemic, the Food RX program was developed as a collaborative initiative between FoodShare Toronto - a local, community-based food justice organization - and the University Health Network, a large university-affiliated hospital network in downtown Toronto, ON. This commentary describes the Food RX program, highlights the lessons learned during its early implementation and offers a set of recommendations for building community partnerships moving forward.

Point-of-care clinical documentation: assessment of a bladder cancer informatics tool (eCancerCareBladder): a randomized controlled study of efficacy, efficiency and user friendliness compared with standard electronic medical records.

Objective: To compare the use of structured reporting software and the standard electronic medical records (EMR) in the management of patients with bladder cancer. The use of a human factors laboratory to study management of disease using simulated clinical scenarios was also assessed.

Design: eCancerCare(Bladder) and the EMR were used to retrieve data and produce clinical reports.

Challenges of hand hygiene in healthcare: the development of a tool kit to create supportive processes and environments.

Hand hygiene compliance by healthcare providers has been difficult to achieve due to diverse environments, work culture, processes and task requirements. Because of this complexity, hand hygiene lends itself well to a human factors analysis in order to design a system that matches human cognitive and physical strengths and makes allowances for human limitations.

Human factors perspectives on a systemic approach to ensuring a safer medication delivery process.

The current, prevailing approach to addressing medication delivery safety issues has been to apply solutions at the point of failure with direct, local remediation. These include computerized physician order entry to address transcription and prescribing problems, tall man lettering for label clarity and smart pump systems to address programming use errors. We discuss the lack of a systemic, holistic approach to addressing medication delivery issues that has led to fragmented solutions that do not address the problem as intended and introduce new, unintended patient safety issues.

Right medication, right dose, right patient, right time, and right route: how do we select the right patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) device?

Patient safety related to medication infusion devices has received considerable attention recently. Critical adverse patient outcomes have resulted from misprogrammed delivery devices, inherent flaws in device design, and human error. A key strategy to improving patient safety is the development of an interdisciplinary team in product selection and the inclusion of registered nurses in the process.