Description

Nurse Karin Berntsen shares if there is legislation that promotes high-quality patient safety.

Transcript

There’s quite a bit of legislation that has either recently been enacted or is being enacted at this time related to patient safety. There has been a big move across the country to help prevent hospital infections. There’s different organizations that are working to pass legislation such as MRSA Screening. MRSA is Methicillin Resistant Staph Aureus and MRSA is one of the super bugs that can occur in the hospital. It’s not only occurring in the hospital, it’s more prevalent now in the community and in health clubs, schools and so we all need to be working together to help change and work with the legislatures on how we can prevent MRSA infections in the hospitals and as well in the community. So there has been reason to legislation in states where patients are required to be screened for MRSA. There’s good and bad to that. Some of that is great because you can identify patients that might have MRSA on their skin and the appropriate treatment could be taken. We certainly don’t want to end up having too much treatment because we could end up with more super bugs as a result of over use of antibiotics. But read about your local legislation. There’s websites you can go to for each state. You can do that in California and other states and see what current bills are going on for patient safety. There are many major areas where patient safety acts have been put in place that actually require that hospitals do certain things to make patients safer such as the fact that they want the patients to speak up and be able to speak up, that is something that’s been influenced by regulations and legislation.