Implementing patient safety in practice

The NHS advocates the use of ‘safety huddles’ to support effective communication at key points in the care of individuals, to improve safety. A safety huddle is a short multidisciplinary briefing,...

Quality improvement, checklists and systems of work: why do we need them?

Clinical governance is a requirement of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) Code of Professional Conduct for veterinary nurses (RCVS 2012). Scally and Donaldson (1998) defined clinical...

How to conduct an effective patient handover

Start by finding out any existing policies or protocols for transfer of care within your organisation. At this point, you may be unsure exactly what part of the handover process you want to improve,...

How to pressure check an anaesthetic machine

Intial machine checks should comprise:.

Patient safety in anaesthesia

There is no doubt that the pursuit of patient safety must address the current gap between best practice and the care currently given to veterinary patients (Weller and Merry, 2013). However, when most...

Peripheral intravenous catheters: improving patient safety with the use of a care bundle

Catheter-associated infections are a significant and serious problem in human medicine (Weese, 2011). In human nursing, care bundles have been introduced to try and reduce the number of blood stream...

Improving patient safety in the perioperative period: surgical safety checklists

The operating room (OR) is acknowledged to be one of the most complex work environments in human health care, so it is perhaps unsurprising that it has such a high potential for complications...