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Sleep apnea among proposed National Patient Safety Goals

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, January 26, 2007

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The Joint Commission unveiled six potential 2008 National Patient Safety Goals (NPSG) on December 8, 2006. They include provisions for anticoagulant use, electronic patient identification, teams that respond to changing patient conditions, obstructive sleep apnea-related harm, worker fatigue, and catheter misconnections.

This is the first year postoperative treatment of patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) has made the list of proposed goals. Medical staff must pay close attention when anesthetizing a patient with OSA, because the condition, combined with the anesthetic, make it impossible for the patient to wake up when he or she stops breathing. The new goal would include the following requirements:

• Screen patients who show signs that they may have sleep apnea.
• Consider OSA when developing the anesthesia plan of care.
• Develop a protocol to deal with OSA that is based on evidence-based best practice.

To learn more, go to Briefings on Patient Safety (BOPS). For the cost of just three stories, you can get the entire February issue of BOPS. Click here to choose between the PDF and HTML versions for just $30. Subscribers to the online version of BOPS have free access to this article. Subscribers to the print newsletter can find this article in their February issue.

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