Alvin C. York VA Medical Center Case Study

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There is an opportunity at the Alvin C. York VA Medical Center to improve the safety of patients and staff during the administration of medications on the acute psychiatric units. Currently, all inpatient units at the Alvin C. York VA Medical Center utilize a Pyxis medication station to store patient medications. The current physical location of the medication room and Pyxis stations are not ideal. The Pyxis machine that stores the medications is placed against the back wall close to the nursing station. The location of the Pyxis is next to the medication room where the nursing medication administration cart and scanning system is located. The nurses must turn their back to the patient that is due to receive medication. Not being able to see …show more content…

York VA Medical Center would be to install a pneumatic tube laboratory and pharmacy delivery system. Currently, the medical center utilizes pharmacy techs to deliver medications across a widely spread out hospital campus. The medical center also utilizes licensed staff members to delivery lab specimens across the campus. This delivery task can take up to 20 minutes to complete. Budgetary constraints are currently limiting our ability to hire more healthcare provdiers, so an ability to utilize licensed caregivers more efficiently would be helpful. By installing a pneumatic delivery system, the hospital system could have the licensed caregivers focus more time on providing excellent care to our patients. There are some noted concerns that using a pneumatic tube system for laboratory specimen delivery may increase the risk of hemolysis in a blood sample (Lima-Oliveira et al., 2014). However, this risk of hemolysis does not pose a substantial harm to patients and is clinically insignificant in the vast majority of cases. This is particularly true in the case of the Alvin C. York Medical Center as the units that would utilize the pneumatic tube system are units that do not serve patients with acute medical conditions. The delay that currently exists due to the extended length of time it takes to transport a specimen from one side of the campus to the other is likely more of a detriment to patient care as the risk of hemolysis from rapid

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