Why patients need leaders: introducing a ward safety checklist.

The safety and consistency of the care given to hospital inpatients has recently become a particular political and public concern. The traditional 'ward round' presents an obvious opportunity for systematically and collectively ensuring that proper standards of care are being achieved for individual patients. This paper describes the design and implementation of a 'ward safety checklist' that defines a set of potential risk factors that should be checked on a daily basis, and offers multidisciplinary teams a number of prompts for sharing and clarifying information between themselves, and with the patient, during a round.

Anti-N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antibodies: a potentially treatable cause of encephalitis in the intensive care unit.

Objective: To report the occurrence of an unusual neurologic disorder requiring admission to the intensive care unit.

Design: Analysis of an observational cohort study of 31 patients with encephalitis admitted over a 4-yr period.

Setting: Neurologic intensive care unit in a tertiary referral center.