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Abstract
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We have read with interest the manuscript "Construction of nursing-sensitive quality indicators for acute poisoning in emergency departments: an e-Delphi study" (Li et al., 2024), recently published in your journal.
Exposure to toxic substances is a worldwide problem. In the case of Catalonia (Spain), with a population of 7.9 million inhabitants, poisoning accounts for 3% of prehospital emergency attendances and 1% of hospital emergency department attendances each year. Within a multi-disciplinary team involved in the care of poisoned patients, nursing staff and emergency technicians are usually the first respondents, since having the tools such as quality indicators (QIs) that are relevant, easy to record and accessible to all, can be decisive.
Spain was a pioneer in proposing and developing 24 QIs in the emergency care of poisoned patients (Nogué-Xarau et al., 2006), validated by the Spanish Association of Toxicology. These indicators already included aspects measurable by nurses such as the recording of clinical constants, the administration of high concentrations of oxygen in the event of suspected carbon monoxide poisoning or the early care of patients to undergo decontamination (Amigó-Tadín et al., 2007). A new QI was recently proposed (Ferrés-Padró et al., 2021) based on the determination of capillary or venous glycaemia and which also directly involves the nursing staff. All these indicators, with their corresponding quality standard, are listed in Table 1. All this represents an opportunity to improve the care of poisoned patients, to detect risk groups, to monitor their records and to promote research in the field (Lirón-García et al., 2023; Llorens et al., 2024; Martínez-Sánchez et al., 2020). ...
Language: en |