| Sample Topics
Current Trends in Nursing Liability
Allegations of nursing liability continue to have common themes of causation but the consequences of liability are now increasingly serious as potential criminal as well as civil implications have been established in some states. Failures to assess, document, communicate and utilize the chain of command to effectively advocate for the patient and effect the nursing process will be discussed in this presentation. Relevant nursing case scenarios identifying key nursing liability issues, errors in critical thinking, and examples of inadequacies leading to breaches in the standard of care will drive the point home, that it can happen in any facility, anywhere, on any day. Practical solutions for nursing staff and nurse managers will be explored to better equip staff to mitigate risk of claims of nursing liability.
Legal Obligations: Duty Amidst Dealing with the Dangerous or Disruptive Patient
Conflict management is a skill utilized by care providers most every day in the health care setting. But what about the conflicting priorities between a call to prevent harm and the need to respect patient rights that can cause real or perceived dilemmas? This presentation explores the legal implications of the duty to warn, duty to report and authority to detain coupled with ethical issues of maintaining patient confidentiality and self-determination that may cause real turmoil for caregivers. A framework for decision-making and techniques for dealing with potentially dangerous patients/families will be discussed to equip providers for more skillful and confident management of these tough situations.
Horizontal Violence: Harm to Caregivers and Patients
What causes the "old" to eat their "young"? Why do intelligent professionals inflict harm on colleagues and engage in counterproductive behaviors? The phenomenon of horizontal violence is an ongoing occurrence that has negative implications on your workforce and your patients alike. This presentation explores the occurrence and the consequences of horizontal violence and provides participants with the ability to identify and intervene with practical solutions to effectively deal with this destructive behavior.
Year One: New Graduates - The Relief and Risk to Organizations
Acquiring new staff nurses to help with the burden of staffing your units is such a relief to nurse managers and leaders alike, but how often are the risks calculated and intentionally mitigated? The common occurrence of misaligned expectations and damages incurred to an organization's workforce and to its patients due to lack of directed attention in Year One nurse issues will be explored in this presentation. Additionally, organizations will be equipped with solutions to foresee the risks incurred when hiring graduate nurses and best-practices to apply proactive solutions to diminish those risks.
Can You Care Too Much?
Emotional exhaustion and compassion fatigue are just two symptoms of provider burnout that may negatively impact how caregivers interact with patients. The impact of witnessing continual pain and suffering of patients and families coupled with organizational systems issues takes an emotional toll on all providers. When a caregiver is forced into a self-protective mode, quality and patient safety can be negatively affected. Providers may insulate themselves and lose their sense of compassion, become cynical or bored, and call-in more frequently. Hospital leaders who understand the causes of provider burnout can take proactive steps to reduce the risk of this occurrence and effectively support their caregivers.
e-Discovery
Healthcare enterprises have shown little sense of urgency to prepare for the demands of e-discovery despite a consensus among most experts that it's probably too late when the first "hold" letter arrives. Perhaps the disruption, intrusion, sanctions, and embarrassment described in e-discovery decisions involving other industries seems implausible in healthcare, but don't be deceived - it can happen to your organization too. This presentation explores the inherent risks associated with storage of electronic data and the steps organizations can take to comply with retention requirements, retrieval demands and avoidance of claims of spoliation to prepare for the burden that will come with the order to produce electronic data in an e-discovery process.
Medical Staff Peer Review
Meaningful and timely peer review is a core component in ensuring quality patient care. This presentation will discuss medical staff Peer Review and the role risk management and quality management plays in this important responsibility. Topics of focus include: Peer Review Regulatory Standards and Liability, CMS Conditions of Participation for hospitals and CAH, The Joint Commission, Peer Review Protection Laws, and Barriers to Effective Peer Review and Possible Solutions.
Credentialing and Medical Staff Issues
This presentation outlines the fundamental processes by which credentialing and privileging should be undertaken. Case studies on the failure to credential appropriately are given. The theory of liability for negligent credentialing is discussed. The fair hearing process is discussed as a mechanism to avoid potential liability for participants in the credentialing and privileging process. This presentation is applicable in the hospital setting. The target audience includes physicians, administrators, medical staff leadership, medical office staff, and board members.
Midlevel Management
Midlevel care providers are important contributors to effective access and delivery of patient care, but can contribute to increased exposure of risk and liability. This presentation focuses on defining scope of practice, and supervision as mandated by state law, and solutions in managing direct and vicarious liability presented by collaboration with mid level providers.
Dealing with Dissatisfaction, Complaints, Grievances & Disclosure
Service recovery and transparency are current "buzz words" of the industry, but what do they mean for your organization? This presentation will discuss best-practice strategies to address patient complaints during the care process and after discharge. The differences between a complaint and a grievance will be identified and federal and regulatory guidelines for complaint management will be discussed. Disclosure of adverse events and tips for establishing an effective disclosure process as a risk management strategy will equip the organization to better mitigate legal damages for claims.
Communication Among Nurses: Soft Skill With Solid Impact on Patient Safety
Optimal patient care mandates clinical competence and coordinated teamwork. Despite the focus on developing organizational cultures of safety and the attention to ensuring effective information hand-offs, communication deficits continue to be the number one contributing factor for sentinel events as reported by The Joint Commission. So what is the problem really? Why can’t brilliant minds and skilled practitioners seem to get it right when it comes to communication? This program will explore the root causes of communication breakdown among nurses and the entire care team, as well as solutions to address the lurking risk of allowing poor communicators to continue to exist in your organization.
Skilled Communication When the Stakes Are High
Much research has been done on the need to create healthy work environments for the health care team to support excellence in the delivery of patient care. “Skilled communication” is one element identified as paramount to establish and sustain such an environment. Patient lives and well-being rest in the balance as practitioners continue to struggle with inadequate communication skills and interpersonal barriers to effective dialogue. This program addresses the “soft” skill of communication in the complex world of clinical delivery.
The Generation Gap: Impact on Communication and Teamwork
The health care work force of today is diverse, with leaders and staff from four different generations making up the care delivery team. Tension resulting from differences in attitudes, work habits, perspectives and expectations threatens team cohesiveness and communication. This program will examine generational assumptions and differences and explore how effective understanding and management of age-diversity in the workforce can reduce conflict and enhance quality and productivity.
Wielding Influence: The Power to Make a Difference for Patients
In today’s health care environment the stress of managing conflicting priorities, limited resources and staffing challenges may lead to a tendency to declare, “Things will never change around here!” Patients trust their lives and well-being to professionals who are dedicated to navigating the complexity of the culture and skillfully advocating for their cause. To positively impact patient outcomes and maximize the contribution of nurses and all care team members, the need for exerting positive influence has never been greater. This program will explore the need to embrace opportunities to use influence when they arise and deliver strategies to effect change for the good of patients.
Medication Safety: Dispensing the Risk
Medication errors continue to plague organizations despite best intentions and attention to safety. This presentation will discuss proactive quality improvement strategies to minimize risk related to common medication errors and contributing factors increasing risk at all points in the continuum of medication management and administration.
Red Rules
Identification, detection, response and appropriate updates and approvals are core components of an effective Red Flag Program. This presentation will summarize strategies for Red Rule and Red Flag implementation and will describe patient safety implications for the implementation of Red Rules in a health care organization.
Mission Critical or Mission Impossible: Finding Solutions to ED Liabilities
The emergency department, fraught with its inherent share of clinical presentations impacting life and death, has a growing burden that compounds the daily challenge of delivering care. Overcrowding of hospital emergency departments is not a foreign concept in most. Too many patients and too few resources leads to delays in the initial evaluation and treatment of patients and to 'boarding' of admitted patients in the ED. This trend leads to a higher incidence of adverse outcomes and potential lawsuits. In the face of these growing challenges, how can you fulfill the mission to your patients to deliver safe, effective and timely care? What can be done to protect your organization from liability to claims of negligence and EMTALA violations?
EMTALA
Compliance with the ever-changing federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) is a constant challenge and may include fines and penalties for failures imposed by CMS and the OIG, significant legal implications, non-coverage by insurance, NPDB reporting, punitive damages and public relations nightmares. This presentation addresses current federal definitions associated with EMTALA, including, but not limited to, triage, medical screening examination, ED, stabilize, transfer, and qualified medical personnel. The process required for compliance is discussed along with current court cases that may blur interpretations of compliance.
Pay for Performance: The Carrot and the Stick
It isn't a mere demonstration or pilot project anymore - pay for performance is here to stay, with growing implications for healthcare facilities and medical providers alike. Hospitals and physicians are being challenged to produce quality data to demonstrate higher quality, greater safety and lower costs in provision of patient care. This presentation explores assumptions, driving forces and some of the opportunities and challenges associated with public reporting of quality data. Emphasis is placed on practical strategies to assist health care leaders to prepare for this growing mandate.
The Patient Experience: Quality Is In the Eye of the Beholder
Customer loyalty and patient satisfaction are essential to success in today's competitive health care market. Differentiation is obtained through excellence in customer service: the patient experience and definition of quality to your patients are imperative to understand. In the age of HCAPS, public reporting and pay for performance, organizations must strategically focus on the patient experience to ensure market share through positive public image, revenue preservation, and risk reduction. This presentation is designed to provide participants with an understanding of customer service principles as well as practical tools and techniques to apply to practice on a daily basis.
Clear and Present Danger: Present on Admission and Hospital Acquired Conditions
Medical conditions that a patient acquires while hospitalized add enormous costs to medical care and result in significant number of injuries and deaths. It is well-recognized that the United States ranks poorly among other developed countries and fails to prevent deaths from treatable conditions more often than the 18 other countries included in the study. Current regulatory and reporting mandates have forced directed attention on this issue, and CMS and private payers are adopting payment reduction policies. Do you know where your organization stands and the danger for the increased costs and lost revenue associated with insufficiencies in documentation and prevention strategies? This presentation will explore how providers can HIM and coding specialists meet guidelines through appropriate documentation on admission. The program will further explore compliance issues and prevention strategies related to hospital acquired conditions and provide solutions to assist the participant in effectively managing these costly conditions.
Root Cause Analysis: Analyze Your Approach
While most organizations understand root cause analysis (RCA) as a quality improvement process to retrospectively review high severity events or near misses, opportunity to evaluate and improve the approach is often found. This presentation will not only outline the steps to conduct a credible and thorough RCA, and address the Joint Commission requirements related to sentinel events and RCA but also examine the differences between shallow cause analysis and root cause analysis. Tools provided to participants will assist in improving the RCA process in the organization for more substantive results improved outcomes.
FMEA: Opportunity Discovered
The Failure Mode Effect Analysis has long been a tool utilized in other industries to proactively identify causes of potential failure in processes in the quality management and process improvement endeavor. Health care organizations that use FMEA effectively recognize this tool as a goldmine of opportunity to proactively mitigate risk and improve quality in patient care process delivery. This presentation will discuss the purpose of FMEA, advantages and disadvantages of the process, and strategies to use the FMEA process to improve patient safety and minimize risk. Tools are provided to assist the participant in more effective implementation this process in their organization.
Informed Consent: Doctrine, Discussion, Decision, Documentation
The legal doctrine of informed consent is a well-known legal doctrine accompanying so much of the care rendered to patients every day. So why is it that claims continue to be asserted on the basis of lack of informed consent? This program will explore the common pitfalls of the informed consent process and equip the participant to recognize their role in the process and solutions to ensure that more than a signature on a form occurs. This program is appropriately tailored for audiences of physicians, nurses and other healthcare team members.
Medical Record Documentation: Asset or Liability?
Are your medical records a legal asset or a liability? Answering this question honestly can likely reveal opportunities for improvement in every organization. Time constraints and competing priorities in patient care make it difficult to always "dot the 'I' and cross the 't'." This presentation will explore the requisite medical record contents to meet regulatory and professional organization standards and provide practical solutions to help manage documentation risks and heighten awareness of need through case examples. This program is appropriately tailored for any mix of audience participants.
The Critical Task of Governing: Navigating the Duties of the Board of Directors
Informed and empowered boards are great assets to health care organizations navigating change and driving for excellence. High performance governance requires members, who clearly understand their duties, engage in best-practices and execute their critical functions to contribute to the long-term success of the organization. This presentation, designed for health care board members and administrators, helps define current issues in patient safety and quality and risk management as interrelated to fiduciary duties of the governing board, providing insight to its members in how to question, probe and oversee these critical accountabilities.
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