Abstract
Despite robust scientific exploration and widely disseminated evidence-based best practice guidelines, quality care remains inconsistent, and unintended harm remains common. Many harm events occur in critical care settings where interventions are frequent, diagnosis and prognosis are uncertain, and human life is most at stake. In the last four decades, the concepts of quality and safety, performance improvement, and risk reduction have enjoyed a meteoric rise. The practice of medicine simply no longer exists without these tenets as the backbone of everyday healthcare delivery. This chapter seeks to summarize commonly encountered means of harm in critical care settings as well as best practices to develop and implement sustainable platforms for quality care in our sickest patients.
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LaRosa, J.A. (2019). Harm and Quality in the ICU. In: LaRosa, J. (eds) Adult Critical Care Medicine. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94424-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94424-1_6
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