Sustaining the Gains: A 7-Year Follow-Through of a Hospital-Wide Patient Safety Improvement Project on Hospital-Wide Adverse Event Outcomes and Patient Safety Culture.

Objectives: Adverse events (AEs) remain a challenge in tertiary healthcare with incidence rates of 4% to 14%, where half are potentially preventable. Reported patient safety strategies rarely involve changing the practices of an entire academic institution and maintaining sustainability. We hypothesize that implementing an effective patient safety strategy (PSS) improves hospital-wide AE rates, cost avoidance, and patient safety culture.

Effectiveness of a Web-Based Simulation in Improving Nurses' Workplace Practice With Deteriorating Ward Patients: A Pre- and Postintervention Study.

Background: Nurses play an important role in detecting patients with clinical deterioration. However, the problem of nurses failing to trigger deteriorating ward patients still persists despite the implementation of a patient safety initiative, the Rapid Response System. A Web-based simulation was developed to enhance nurses' role in recognizing and responding to deteriorating patients.

Teamwork and communication: an effective approach to patient safety.

Teamwork and communication failures are leading causes of patient safety incidents in health care. Though health care providers must work in teams, they are not well-trained in teamwork and communication skills. Health care faces the problems of differences in communication styles, communication failures and poor teamwork.

Bedside pleural procedures by pulmonologists and non-pulmonologists: a 3-year safety audit.

Background And Objective: Pleural procedures such as tube thoracostomy and chest aspirations are commonly performed and carry potential risks of visceral organ injury, pneumothorax and bleeding. In this context limited information exists on the complication rates when non-pulmonologists perform ultrasound-guided bedside pleural procedures. Bedside pleural procedures in our university hospital were audited to compare complication rates between pulmonologists and non-pulmonologists.

Comparison of clinical outcomes and cost between surgical and transcatheter device closure of atrial septal defects in Singapore children.

Introduction: With advances in interventional catheterisation, transcatheter device closure of atrial septal defect (ASD) is now a feasible option to open heart surgery, especially in patients with isolated ASD. We aim to compare the outcomes, benefits and costs between device closure versus standard open-heart surgery for ASD in Singapore.

Materials And Methods: This is a comparative study between 2 cohorts with isolated secundum ASDs who underwent closure of ASD either by surgery or device, at the Department of Paediatrics, National University Hospital (NUH).