Becker's Hospital Review

60 CMO / CARE DELIVERY CDC, CMS and others call for urgent action on patient safety By Mackenzie Bean A group of federal and indus- try safety leaders have issued an urgent call for healthcare organizations to rebuild the founda- tions for safe care that deteriorated during the pandemic. The National Steering Committee for Patient Safety — a group of leaders from 27 organizations, including the CDC, CMS and Agency for Health- care Research and Quality — issued the call to action. The expert com- mittee, created by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, shared its Declaration to Advance Patient Safety this week during the institute's Patient Safety Congress in Dallas. The committee is urging healthcare leaders to: 1. Review the 17 recommendations and strategies to improve patient safe- ty detailed in its national action plan. 2. Appoint a leader and team to eval- uate their organization's current state of safety using a self-assessment tool. 3. Implement strategies to strength- en their organization's safety perfor- mance and develop methods to track progress by using an implementation resource guide. "There is a critical need for health- care leaders to take urgent action to create, rebuild and sustain the foundations for safe care to address long-standing challenges and trou- bling setbacks in patient and work- force safety during the pandemic," Patricia McGaffigan, RN, vice presi- dent of the institute, said in a May 17 news release. "The national action plan provides leaders with the tools to assess the current state of their or- ganization's foundational safety prac- tices and offers actionable solutions for a clear path forward." n 55% of COVID-19 survivors have at least one symptom 2 years later, study finds By Erica Carbajal I n what researchers are calling the longest follow-up study to date, findings published May 11 in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine suggest more than half of patients hospital- ized with COVID-19 still have at least one symptom two years later. The findings are based on an anal- ysis of 1,192 COVID-19 patients at Jin Yin-tan Hospital in Wuhan, China, between Jan. 7 and May 29, 2020. Researchers followed up on their health at six months, 12 months and two years. Ninety-four percent of the participants attended a face-to-face interview two years after infection. Follow-up assessments involved a six-minute walking test, laboratory tests, questionnaires on symptoms, mental health and health-related quality of life and healthcare use after hospital discharge. About 68 percent of 1,149 partici- pants who attended follow-ups six months after acute infection reported at least one symptom. At two years, that figure was 55 percent among 1,190 who followed up at that time. Patients who recovered from COVID-19 were generally in poorer health during follow ups, with a high- er proportion more likely to report a number of symptoms such as fatigue, joint pain and headaches compared to the general population. Researchers said their findings sug- gest more than two years is needed to fully recover for some hospital- ized patients. "There is a clear need to provide continued support to a significant proportion of people who've had COVID-19, and to understand how vaccines, emerging treatments and variants affect long-term health out- comes," said Bin Cao, MD, lead study author and vice director of the Na- tional Clinical Research Center for Respiratory Diseases at China-Japan Friendship Hospital. n

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