The COVID-19 pandemic has strained the healthcare system. It has led to the use of temporary isolation systems and less-then-optimum patient placement configurations because of inadequate number of isolation rooms, both of which can compromise provider safety. Three key elements require special attention to reduce the maximum and average aerosolized contaminant concentration exposure to a healthcare worker in any isolation system: flow rate; air changes per hour; and patient placement. This is important because concentration exposures of aerosolized contaminants to healthcare workers in hospitals using temporary isolation systems can reach levels 21-30 times greater than a properly engineered negative pressure isolation room. A working knowledge of these three elements can help create a safer environment for healthcare workers when isolation rooms are not available.

Many emergency departments (EDs) compare themselves to national productivity benchmarks, such as the average patients/hour or relative value units (RVUs)/hour. Making these comparisons does not provide a tool to determine which processes need improvement, most urgently, within the ED to improve efficiency. Furthermore, there has been no clear means to determine how to set reasonable goals based on the capabilities of the particular ED under study. Determining the power of a process is a tool that can provide the ED with these missing pieces of information. [West J Emerg Med. 2013;14(5):551–554.]

Measuring workplace performance is important to emergency department management. If an unreliable model is used, the results will be inaccurate. Use of inaccurate results to make decisions, such as how to distribute the incentive pay, will lead to rewarding the wrong people and will potentially demoralize top performers. This article demonstrates a statistical model to reliably measure the work accomplished, which can then be used as a performance measurement. [West J Emerg Med.2012;13(2):176–180.]