Employees of Journey Nursing Services will complete an incident report and submit it through Axxess, electronic medical records system, for review. Any incident that results in the harm of a patient or staff member or the risk of harm to a patient or staff member. Incident reports are not punitive but an opportunity to provide training and reduce future events.

Reportable incidents include:

• Patient injury
• Patient Falls
• Medication errors
• Medication documentation errors
• Acts of violence
• Suicide attempt or completion.
• External or internal disaster- such as a power outage for a client with a ventilator
• Allegations of abuse
• Discharge against medical advice.

Include in each incident report will be:

• Who was involved in the incident?
• Which client the incident relates to
• Type of incident 
• Date of incident
• Document who was notified of the incident: family, manager, etc. 
• Document If the provider was notified
• If any new orders resulted from the incident
• Detail of incident 
• What preventative actions were taken from the incident occurring again
• Any follow up required

Documenting infections in the infection log is important for quality control and the prevention of disease it helps us look at the trajectory of logs to see if there's good hand hygiene or other inspections aspects of health care such as post op infections you increased COVID or other incident infection it can help us track and reduce infection.

Occasionally in home care you will be notified that a patient has started on a new antibiotic but you didn't know in advance that they had an infection however you can go ahead and fill out an infection log based on the fact that they have a treatment for an infection. An antibiotic prescription is only going to be provided when a infection is present.

Ensure if your patient is started on an antibiotic that you are continuing to have that antibiotic used for the duration of the prescription there is no such thing as extra antibiotics every course of antibiotics is prescribed for the determined amount of time that it takes to get rid of that infection. Yes sometimes patients do feel better before the infection is fully healed but if we stop the antibiotics early and sometimes patients will request this there is the risk that the antibiotic that the infection will flare back up and those antibiotics may not work the next time around

 Always ensure that you are washing your hands when you arrive at your patients house verbalize that you're washing them even if they don't see them that'll help them feel safer and more protected in your hygiene period