New Guide Aims for Safer ICUs

A combination of critically ill patients, high-tech equipment, and busy staff makes the intensive care unit (ICU) one of the most complicated environments for health care facilities. A 2005 study found that adverse events in ICUs occurred at a rate of 81 per 1,000 patient-days; the study deemed nearly one-half of these events to be preventable.

A new guide and CD-ROM is designed to help healthcare professionals increase patient safety in the ICU environment. The guide, Critical Care Safety: Essentials for ICU Patient Care and Technology, was developed by ECRI Institute - formerly ECRI - an independent nonprofit organization that researches best approaches to improving patient care, and it provides guidelines for implementing risk-management and quality-improvement plans in the ICU.

The guide combines ECRI Institute's patient safety and risk management expertise with the organization's medical device expertise. The 150-page guide is designed to help facilities:

* assess the ICU environment to identify improvement priorities
* educate ICU staff about patient safety and engage them in improvement efforts
* develop clinical approaches that improve ICU patient outcomes
* emphasize safe selection and use of ICU medical devices and technology.

Each guide comes with a CD-ROM containing time-saving tools to help critical-care physicians, critical-care nurses, ICU managers, administrators of critical-care services, clinical engineering departments, risk managers, and patient safety officers develop ICU improvement plans or enhance existing ones. Tools include:

* self-assessment tools to help you evaluate patient safety in critical care units
* sample policies
* education tools such as slide shows and teaching plans
* links to additional online resources.

More information, as well as the table of contents and a sample tool, is available online at www.ecri.org/criticalcare.

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