June 2017

Antibiotic stewardship is becoming a “must address” topic in hospitals as many lag behind in the implementation of required national guidelines.

As someone on the front line of patient care, I know one thing to be absolutely true: left unchecked, the stress nurses face on a daily basis in providing care for others can severely impair their mental and physical well-being.

For many years, effectively managing post-surgical pain for patients has taken the form of a prescription for an opioid. The dose and the duration are based on general dosing guidelines, clinical outcome data and patient feedback about their pain.

A small, 300-bed health system in western Illinois wanted to see how it benchmarked against similar community hospitals for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) readmission rates.