Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Basic Hand Washing Offers Return on Investment in Healthcare

The World Health Organization (WHO) offered a reminder this week that healthcare organizations and frontline health professionals should prioritize and revisit their hand hygiene practices. As a well-established and low-cost practice, proper hand hygiene safeguards patients and clinicians from infection, WHO says. Protective gloves reduce the risk of infection transmission, but they should not be used as a replacement for basic hand hygiene. Gloves can become contaminated and are frequently misused—such as being worn continuously …

Abstracts In Urgent Care: December, 2008

ED Crowding Adversely Affects Patient Satisfaction Key point: Dissatisfaction lasts throughout entire hospital stay. Citation: Pines JM, Iyer S, Disbot M, et al. The effect of emergency department crowding on patient satisfaction for admitted patients. Acad Emerg Med. 2008;15:825-831. Recent studies on emergency department overcrowding have shown adverse patient outcomes when patients are boarded in the emergency department. To address how patient satisfaction relates to ED overcrowding, these authors retrospectively reviewed Press Ganey satisfaction surveys …