Ziver F. Ismail, Tevfik F. Ismail and Alan J. Wilson
The purpose of this paper is to audit the use of three strategies for protecting hospital inpatients with allergies: red allergy wristbands for patients with allergies; white…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to audit the use of three strategies for protecting hospital inpatients with allergies: red allergy wristbands for patients with allergies; white identification wristbands for all patients; and completion of an “allergy box” on drug charts. The paper also aims to assess the impact of making pharmacists responsible for ensuring allergy box completion.
Design/methodology/approach
The setting was The Whittington Hospital, London, a district general hospital. Two cross‐sectional studies were conducted 11 months apart, before and after pharmacists were made responsible for ensuring allergy box completion. The studies involved 186 (pre‐intervention) and 250 (post‐intervention) unselected adult patients.
Findings
The proportion of blank allergy boxes decreased significantly from 24.7 per cent to 5.2 per cent (p<0.001) when pharmacists were made responsible for ensuring allergy box completion. The most common reason for blank allergy boxes in both studies was that doctors sought and documented allergies in the notes but then forgot to complete the allergy box. Although the proportion of patients lacking allergy wristbands was less in the second study compared with the first (30.4 v. 44.8 per cent, respectively), the difference was not significant (p=0.206). Similarly, the second study showed a non‐significant decrease in the proportion of patients lacking identification wristbands from 12.9 per cent to 10.8 per cent (p=0.499).
Practical implications
A formal checking system is required for allergy and identification wristbands to improve use of these basic, inexpensive measures for preventing drug errors.
Originality/value
The paper shows that making pharmacists responsible for ensuring allergy status documentation on drug charts significantly increased use of this safety measure.
Details
Keywords
Mustafa Tevfik Kartal, Serpil Kılıç Depren and Özer Depren
This paper aims to determine priority issues in the corporate governance (CG) principles to increase CG rating notes of publicly traded companies.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to determine priority issues in the corporate governance (CG) principles to increase CG rating notes of publicly traded companies.
Design/methodology/approach
This study defines the priority issues for publicly traded companies that should be focused to increase the CG rating notes. In this context, this study considers the companies in Borsa Istanbul CG index (XKURY), use data for 2018, 2019, 2020, and applies machine learning algorithms.
Findings
Overall, importance of each CG principle changes for the CG rating notes; first five CG principles in terms of significance have a total of 43.6% importance for the CG rating notes; following a straight-line approach in completing deficiencies of the CG principles cannot help increase the CG rating notes. Hence, empirical results highlight the impact of the most significant CG principles in terms of the CG rating notes that should be focused on by publicly traded companies so that CG ratings can be increased.
Research limitations/implications
This study uses Turkey data and considers publicly traded companies in the XKURY index. The main cause of this condition is that consolidated data of compliance report format for all publicly traded companies cannot be obtained.
Practical implications
The publicly traded companies can increase the CG rating notes by considering the results of this study while focusing on priority issues in the CG principles.
Social implications
The study determines the most important CG principles that companies can focus on, highlights the importance of usage of machine learning algorithms in determining the most influential CG principles in terms of the CG rating notes and reflects on the difficulties for gathering consolidated CG principles compliance reporting data for all publicly traded companies. Hence, societies can have better companies that are ruled more efficiently and corporately by increasing their compliance with the CG principles.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical study that determines the priority issues to increase the CG rating notes of publicly traded companies based on the new CG principles compliance reporting scheme in Turkey. Following this aim, machine learning algorithms, which can present better results with regard to most of the econometric models, are used in this study.