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ch 13 summary Davis Advantage for Fundamentals of Nursing Care Concepts Connections & Skills 4th Edition
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Fundamentals of Nursing Care 4e Audio Chapter Summary CH Chapter 13 – Safety Your safety and the safety of your patients requires that you be alert every day to potential hazards where you work. Safety in any healthcare facility is everyone’s responsibility. Your professionalism and safe practice will help insure your own well-being and the safety of others around you. Address any factors that can contribute to unsafe patient environments, including a patient’s unfamiliarity to the care facility and equipment, age, ability to understand, impaired mobility, communication barriers, and pain or discomfort. The National Patient Safety Goals were established specifically to help decrease injury and harm to patients. These national standards can help guide you to identify patients correctly, improve staff communication, use medicines safely, prevent infections, identify patient safety risks, and prevent mistakes in surgery. Each care facility must have a fall reduction program, which can include a fall assessment rating scale that provides a numerical rating for each patient’s risk for falls. Patients identified as “at risk” may need reminders not to get up and try to walk unattended, or to alert nursing staff when the patient is attempting to do so. There are several ways to avoid this situation without use of restraints. If the use of restraints is unavoidable, a physician’s order must be obtained first. Remember to always apply restraints correctly and tie them with a quick-release knot. Make frequent checks, and release the restraints every 2 hours for bathroom breaks. Offer food and fluids, and check for
Fundamentals of Nursing Care 4e Audio Chapter Summary CH any signs of skin breakdown or bruising. If you delegate checks and releases to a assistive personnel or CNA, ensure they are being done correctly and according to facility policy. Keeping your certifications up-to-date, including your certification for cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, is essential. This way, if you encounter an unresponsive patient, you can initiate a Code Blue or its equivalent according to your facility’s policies, and begin CPR or rescue breathing right away until specially trained personnel arrive, also known as code teams. It’s also important that everyone knows what to do in case of a fire or other emergency. Become familiar with common code words for situations like fires or fire drills, as well as acronyms to help you easily and quickly respond during such a situation. For example: if a fire occurs in your area, follow the acronym RACE—Rescue, Alarm, Confine, and Extinguish. This means: rescue patients from danger, sound the alarm, confine the fire, and extinguish it if it is small, or wait for the fire department if the fire is larger. To correctly use a fire extinguisher, follow the acronym PASS—Pull, Aim, Squeeze, and Sweep. This means: pull the pin, aim the nozzle at the base of the flames, squeeze the handles together, and sweep the nozzle back and forth to extinguish the fire. A Mass casualty event, or MCE, is a public health or medical emergency involving thousands of victims. Your responsibility as a nurse will be to follow your facility’s disaster plan, know the change in standards of care for the MCE, and expect to be called in to work extra shifts.