Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

17 PATIENT SAFETY & OUTCOMES 17 most common long COVID-19 symptoms: Kaiser Permanente By Mackenzie Bean R esearchers at Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente identified 17 conditions most frequently associated with long COVID-19 in a study published Oct. 12 in Nature Medicine. e study is among the first to account for preexisting conditions when defining such symptoms. Researchers analyzed EHR data on 28,118 patients who tested positive for COVID-19 in 2020 and 70,293 who tested negative. Researchers matched COVID-19-positive patients to negative patients by age, sex, testing month and service area, controlling for any preexisting conditions reported in the last four years. is comparison allowed researchers to identify when COVID-19 likely did not play a role in the development of a given symptom. e 17 most frequent conditions associated with long COVID-19 were: • Other lower respiratory disease • Diabetes • Gastrointestinal disease • Conditions associated with dizziness or vertigo • Abdominal pain • Nonspecific chest pain • Mental health • Anxiety disorders • Genitourinary symptoms and ill-defined conditions • Malaise and fatigue • Cardiac dysrhythmias • Other nervous system disorders • Respiratory failure, insufficiency, arrest • Nausea and vomiting • Fluid and electrolyte disorders • Other nutritional, endocrine and metabolic disorders • Anosmia "e overall cumulative incidence of [ post-acute sequelae of SARS- CoV-2], as defined by COVID positive patients with a PASC-related diagnosis in the acute and persistent or late periods, is 16.5 percent," study authors said. "ese findings contribute to the overall evaluation of PASC and can be employed by clinicians in their care of patients who are diagnosed with COVID-19." n Hospital room setup may affect surgical patients' outcomes: study By Erica Carbajal H ospital room features such as a window view and distance from a nursing station may affect patient outcomes after high-risk operations, according to research presented Oct. 16 at the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress 2022. The study was led by researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. It's based on 3,964 patients who underwent 13 high-risk procedures — including colectomy, pancreatectomy and kidney transplant — at the University of Michigan Hospital between 2016 and 2019. Room features that influenced outcomes included distance from a nursing station, single room occupancy and having a direct line of sight to clinicians, the findings showed. After adjusting for comorbidities and complexity of the procedure, researchers found inpatient mortality rates were 20 percent higher for patients admitted to a room without a window compared to those in a room with a window. Overall, 30-day mortality was lower for patients in rooms with a window or direct line of sight to the main nursing station. Researchers also found that sicker patients were more likely to be placed in rooms with features associated with lower mortality rates. "This investigation provided evidence that patients had differential outcomes across room design features, when accounting for clinical risk, and warrants further investigation for how hospital design may be influencing outcomes," said Mitchell Mead, study author and a health and design scholar at the University of Michigan. Future studies on hospital room features and clinical outcomes should include multiple hospitals to see if the results are generalizable, the researchers said. n Physician burnout is a patient safety hazard, study suggests By Cailey Gleeson P hysician burnout is associated with a reduction in care quality, a Sept. 14 study published in The BMJ found. "Burnout is not just a question of personal wellbeing or career satisfaction - it is a matter of patient safety," Latifa Patel, MD, chair of the British Medical Association's representative body, told Bloomberg Sept. 14. "Tired, undervalued and understrength doctors cannot work to the best of their abilities and these figures throw into disturbing relief what that means for patient care." Researchers conducted an analysis of "all available" research on clinician burnout, evaluating 170 studies that involved more than 239,000 physicians. Two key findings: • Physician burnout doubled patient safety incidents overall. • The association between burnout and patient safety incidents was greatest in physicians aged 20-30 and those working in emergency medicine. n

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