Contaminated surgical instruments made ECRI Institute’s 2019 annual top 10 list of health technology hazards, coming in at number five: “Mishandling flexible endoscopes after disinfection can lead to patient infections.” Number two on the list in 2018 was “Endoscope reprocessing failures continue to expose patients to infection risk.” It’s not…

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Editor's Note US hospitals added 4,200 jobs in February to a seasonally adjusted 5,212,700, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on March 8. That’s up 103,200 more employees than a year ago. Overall, healthcare employment has increased 361,100 in the past year. The overall unemployment rate declined by 0.2% in…

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Editor's Note New nurses are predominantly working 12-hour shifts and nearly half work overtime each week, trends that have remained relatively the same over the past 10 years, this study finds. Analyzing surveys from more than 4,500 newly licensed nurses in 13 states and Washington, DC, researchers from New York…

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Editor's Note US hospitals added 18,800 jobs in January to a seasonally adjusted 5,214,200, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on February 1. That’s up 112,100 more employees than a year ago. Overall, healthcare employment has increased 367,800 in the past year. The overall unemployment rose by 0.1% in January…

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Editor's Note US healthcare added 50,200 jobs in December to a seasonally adjusted 16,213,000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on January 4. That is up 346,000 more employees than a year ago, and the highest since 1990. The overall unemployment rate rose by 0.2% to 3.9%.  

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Editor's Note US hospital jobs increased 12,700 in November to a seasonally adjusted 5,228,200, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on December 7. That is up 118,000 more employees than a year ago. Overall, healthcare employment has increased by 328,300 in the past year. The overall unemployment rate is 3.7%.

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Editor's Note Improvements in hospital work environments, nurse staffing, and educational levels of nurses coincided with improvements in patient safety and quality of care in this panel study from Linda Aiken, PhD, RN, and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, Philadelphia. Using data from a panel of…

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Editor's Note A nurse’s ability to provide optimal patient care is influenced by a variety of factors, not just nurse to patient ratios, this study finds. In this study of 136 neonatal intensive care nurses caring for 418 infants during 332 12-hour shifts, subjective workload was the one variable that…

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Editor's Note The Massachusetts ballot Question 1 that would have set strict limits on the number of hospital patients a nurse could care for at one time went down in defeat on November 6, the November 7 Boston Globe reports. Hospitals spent nearly $25 million to defeat the measure, more…

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Editor's Note Survey data from thousands of nurses and patients shows that patient safety remains a serious concern and that failure to improve hospital work environments may be hampering progress, finds this study by Linda Aiken, PhD, RN, and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Of 53,644…

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