Nurses on strike

Hospital vs. the MNA Minnesota Nursing association

Today after
Barring a last-minute agreement, the strike by about 12,000 registered nurses would be the largest in the profession's history in the U.S.


Hospital leaders have agreed that nurse staffing can be problematic — both when there are too many patients and too few.

All of the hospitals already "float" nurses to busier units, but the Allina and Children's contracts had sought to expand their ability to do that.
Obstetrics nurse Peggy Wiseman said her no vote was for her patients at St. John's Hospital, though she worries how they'll fare during a strike.
"I'm concerned about what's going to happen to our patients," she said. "I'm worried they're not going to have enough temporary nurses to take our places."
"This is like (turning around) a train."



The union believes hospitals need to budget for more than their expected bed capacity so that nurses don't get overloaded with patients and always are available for new admissions.

eMAR

National

AHRQ Study Shows Using Bar-Code Technology with eMAR Reduces Medication Administration and Transcription Errors

A new study funded by the Department of Health & Human Services' (HHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) indicates that using bar-code technology with an electronic medication administration record (eMAR) substantially reduces transcription and medication administration errors, as well as potential drug-related adverse events. The study is published in the May 6 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Bar-code eMAR is a combination of technologies that ensures that the correct medication is administered in the correct dose at the correct time to the correct patient. When nurses use this combination of technologies, medication orders appear electronically in a patient's chart after pharmacist approval. Alerts are sent to nurses electronically if a patient's medication is overdue.

Having bar-code eMAR technologies in place was associated with reductions in errors related to the timing of medications, such as giving a medicine at the wrong time, and non-timing medication administration, such as giving a patient the wrong dose. The study documented a 41 percent reduction in non-timing administration errors and a 51 percent reduction in potential drug-related adverse events associated with this type of error.

The findings have important implications because bar-code eMAR technology is being considered as a 2013 criterion for meaningful use of health information technology under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). http://www.ahrq.gov/news/press/pr2010/emarpr.htm