Staff nurses creating safe passage with evidence-based practice.

Patient safety is one of the most critical issues for health care today. The escalating need to decrease preventable complications serves as a significant catalyst to identify and use evidence-based practice (EBP) at the bedside. Decreasing preventable complications requires a synergistic relationship between the nurses at the bedside and nursing leadership.

The American Association of Critical Care Nurses standards for establishing and sustaining healthy work environments: off the printed page and into practice.

There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that an unhealthy work environment has an adverse impact not only on patients and families but on employees and organizations. The purpose of this article is to introduce the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses standards for establishing and sustaining a healthy work environment and to discuss ways to implement the standards in the acute and critical care workplace.

Description and outcomes of a custom Web-based patient occurrence reporting system developed for Baylor University Medical Center and other system entities.

Problem: To improve the timeliness, efficiency, and effectiveness of occurrence reporting.

Setting: Baylor University Medical Center, a 1000-bed tertiary facility, and other components of the Baylor Health Care System, all located in Dallas and the surrounding area.

Strategies For Improvement: Designing a custom Web-based patient occurrence reporting system through the efforts of the Center for Quality and Care Coordination and Information Services and training staff not only in using the system but also in viewing reporting as a key element for quality and safety rather than as an individual performance or disciplinary measure.

Going paperless with custom-built Web-based patient occurrence reporting.

Background: Baylor University Medical Center (Dallas) converted patient occurrence reporting from a paper form to a custom-built Web-based system that used the medical center's intranet. DEVELOPING THE WEB-BASED SYSTEM: Non-medication patient occurrences were documented manually on paper forms known as incident reports, and medication variances were entered electronically. The medical center had used the same paper form for many years, without any interim updates or revisions.