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Nurse-Patient Assignments: A Fresh Look

As hospitals continue to try to reduce costs, improve operations and still provide quality care, one area that might benefit from an evidence-based practice review could be nurse-patient assignments. There’s certainly no shortage of complaints and concerns about the process among nursing units. Whether it’s concerns about favoritism leading to unfair nurse-patient assignments or whether it’s heavy workloads leading to…
News and Insights
December 7, 2019
Blog

Workflow Management by Ryan Secan, MD

I had a very interesting discussion here on day #2 of the SHM Leadership Academy.  I was speaking with a potential client of our ASSIGNCARE product suite, and to continue the theme from yesterday, we were discussing workload management. Workload Management About a year or so ago, I heard Dr John Nelson give a talk about workload, and one of…
Ryan Secan
November 10, 2019
Blog

Workload Balancing by Ryan Secan, MD

I’d like to take a quick break from our series on physician inertia to discuss one of the more interesting things I’ve learned exhibiting at SHM Leadership Academy taking place right now in Nashville.  At this gathering, hospitalist leaders from around the country get together to learn about the challenges facing hospital medicine, and how they can better respond to…
Ryan Secan
November 5, 2019
Blog

Slow to change – Part 2

It is a commonly held belief that medicine (being inherently conservative with the lives of patients at risk) is quite slow to change.  It is often cited that it takes 17 years for research evidence to reach clinical practice.  While the estimate is problematic (Morris, Wooding, and Grant point out that three separate studies have demonstrated this 17-year lag, however,…
Ryan Secan
October 30, 2019
Blog

Physician Burnout in a Single Health System

While physician burnout continues to be seen throughout healthcare, a group of researchers wanted to evaluate its impact and prevalence within a single health system. Relying on data collected from the Cleveland Clinic, researchers Amy Windover, PhD, Kathryn Martinez, PhD, MPH, and Mary Beth Mercer, MPH looked at data from a survey conducted between 2013 and 2014, which used the…
News and Insights
October 7, 2019
Blog

Slow to change – Part 1

I was reading the Journal of Hospital Medicine the other day, and after enjoying the Things We Do For No Reason column again (which is one of my very favorite things to read, given an unfortunate contrarian bias I have), I began to look at all of the previous columns.  I was amazed by how many of them there are…
Ryan Secan
September 30, 2019
Blog

Nursing Workloads, Frequent Interruptions and Job Satisfaction

While a number of studies continue to explore the correlation between nursing workloads and patient safety, some specific studies have been looking into the extent to which “care not done” is associated with heavy workloads. For example, in one Canadian study, researchers looked at 472 acute care nurses from one province. They considered seven indicators of workload: (1) RN staffing…
News and Insights
June 7, 2019