Decreasing Hospital-acquired Pressure Injuries During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A 5-step Quality Improvement Approach.

Background: Hospital-acquired pressure injuries (HAPIs) are common adverse events with large burdens on patients and health systems. In 2020, during the initial waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, the incidence of admitted patients with HAPIs of stage II and above in our health system rose from 2.92% to 3.

Long-term treatment outcomes in a First Nations high school population with opioid use disorder.

Objective: To assess for long-term positive effects of buprenorphine treatment (BT) on opioid use disorder (OUD) at a Nishnawbe Aski Nation high school clinic.

Design: Postgraduation telephone survey of high school students between March 2017 and January 2018.

Setting: Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School in Thunder Bay, Ont.

Evaluating appropriate red blood cell transfusions: a quality audit at 10 Ontario hospitals to determine the optimal measure for assessing appropriateness.

Background: Evaluating the appropriateness of red blood cell (RBC) transfusion requires labor-intensive medical chart audits and expert adjudication. We sought to determine the appropriateness of RBC transfusions at 10 hospitals using retrospective chart review and to determine whether simple metrics (proportion of single-unit transfusions, RBCs/100 acute inpatient days, proportion of transfusions with pretransfusion hemoglobin <80 g/L or posttransfusion hemoglobin <90 g/L) could be used as surrogate markers of appropriateness by comparing their values with the results from the audit.

Study Design And Methods: An initial block of 30 RBC units was dually adjudicated for appropriateness followed by additional blocks of 10 units until the difference between the cumulative percentage of appropriate RBC units in the preceding block and final block was <3%.

Educational intervention for obstetrical nurses: introducing intravenous fentanyl to the labour floor.

Objective: To determine the efficacy of an educational intervention in changing nurses' satisfaction and comfort with and their knowledge and use of a newly introduced analgesic agent, fentanyl, to manage pain during labour.

Methods: A written survey was completed by 19 labour and delivery nurses before and after the educational intervention in a small Northern Canadian city.

Results: Prior to the educational intervention, respondents rated their knowledge of and comfort with use of morphine and meperidine as significantly greater than their knowledge of and comfort with use of fentanyl (P<0.