Where do you go for help, when you are a parent of a child who stops breathing while it sleeps? If you live in the south of Sweden, you go to Halmstad County Hospital, where a team of specialists are ready to monitor your sleeping child by polysomnography (PSG). The neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) in Halmstad has ...

Mock inspections are a great way to prepare for real-life inspections from regulatory agencies such as CAP and JCAHO. But where do you start? And most importantly, what should you look for? Lou Ann Wyer, Clinical Specialist, POCT at the Virginia-based Sentara Laboratory Services and Theresa Kulik, Point-of-care...

Hospital do Coração (HCor) in São Paolo, Brazil is a hospital for cardiac patients, many of whom are children and newborns. Cardiac patients are closely monitored with respect to acid base and blood gases, and even the newborns have several arterial and venous blood samples drawn daily. Dr Alberto Duarte from the...

How to implement improvements in hospital settings within a week Jens Weirsøe is one of Radiometer's most experienced Master Black Belts in Transactional Process Improvements (TPI or kaizen). He has facilitated 90 kaizen events in several countries (USA, Japan, Germany and Denmark), in several different industry...

Reprinted with permission from British Journal of Nursing, 2004, Vol 13, No 9.  Arterial puncture is the most common method used to obtain a sample for the measurement of arterial blood gases (ABGs) and is essential to guide the prescription of long-term oxygen therapy (LTOT) in patients with chronic hypoxic lung...

The National Kidney Disease Education Program (NKDEP) Laboratory Working Group reviewed problems related to serum creatinine measurement for estimating glomerular filtration rate (GFR) and prepared recommendations to standardize and improve creatinine measurement. The NKDEP recommends using the estimating equation...

There is widespread confusion concerning the quantities to be used in the description of the oxygen-transport properties of human blood [1]. It all began in 1980 with the introduction of a changed (and wrong) definition of oxygen saturation in a paper on a new instrument for multicomponent analysis (MCA) of...

Effectively written policies and procedures can help contribute to an error-free POCT program. Sentara Healthcare has incorporated policy and procedure development into their safety program. It is coined Focus & Simplify and is about improving the effectiveness of work processes and procedure documentation.  Through ...

Iatrogenic phlebotomy loss resulting from the intensive clinical monitoring in the weeks immediately following birth remains the primary cause of neonatal anemia and the need for red-blood-cell (RBC) transfusion. Reducing RBC transfusion needs in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) requires new approaches for...

Blood gases are measured from an arterial blood sample to evaluate the respiratory adequacy and oxygen status of the critically ill patient. For the adult patient, the arterial blood is sampled either by arterial puncture or from an indwelling catheter. In neonates and children, the wish to minimize iatrogenic blood...