DiversityNursing Blog

Jessica Zegre-Hemsey, a cardiac monitoring expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her colleagues at the University of California San Francisco, revealed more than 2.5 million alarms were triggered on bedside monitors in a single month - the first figure ever reported from a real-world hospital setting.

Alarm fatigue occurs when nurses and other clinicians are exposed to a high number of physiological alarms generated by modern monitoring systems. In turn, alarms are ignored and critical alarms are missed because many alarms are false or non-actionable.

The work, the first of its kind to investigate the frequency and accuracy of alarms, addresses a growing patient safety issue that has gained national attention in recent years when a patient died despite multiple alarms that indicated low heart rate. The issue also addresses hidden downsides to modern monitoring technologies.

"Current technologies have been instrumental in saving lives but they can be improved," said Zègre-Hemsey, who is an assistant professor at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Nursing. "For example, current monitoring systems do not take into account differences among patients. If alarm settings were tailored more specifically to individuals that could go a long way in reducing the number of alarms health care providers respond to."

Zègre-Hemsey and her colleagues collected alarm data on 461 adults in five intensive care units at the UCSF Medical Center for a period of 31 days. Zègre-Hemsey was one of four scientists who analyzed the alarms and helped to determine if they were true or false.

Investigators analyzed a subset of 12,671 arrhythmia alarms, which are designed to alert providers to abnormal cardiac conditions, and found 88.8 percent were false positives. Most of the false alarms were caused by deficiencies in the computer's algorithms, inappropriate user settings, technical malfunctions, and non-actionable events, such as brief spikes in heart rate, that don't require treatment.

A potential solution the researchers suggested would be to design monitors that could be configured to individual patients. No two bodies are exactly the same, and if the monitors could be adjusted to a patient's unique vital signs, the machines would not mistake a normal condition for an abnormal one. A "gold standard" database of annotated alarms could also help developers create computer algorithms that are less sensitive to artifacts.

According to Zègre-Hemsey, reducing alarm fatigue will ultimately require strong collaborations between clinicians, engineers, and hospital administrators as well as additional research.

"Alarm fatigue is a large and complex problem," she said. "Yet the implications are far-reaching since sentinel events like patient death have been reported. This is a current patient safety crisis."

The study was led by primary investigator Barbara J. Drew at UCSF. Co-authors on the paper include UCSF researchers Patricia Harris, Daniel Schindler, Rebeca Salas-Boni, Yong Bai, Adelita Tinoco, Quan Ding, and Xiao Hu from the UCSF department of physiological nursing and Tina Mammone from the UCSF department of nursing.

Source: www.medicalnewstoday.com

By GILLIAN MOHNEY

A Colorado family welcomed a larger-than-expected bundle of joy when their newborn daughter was born weighing almost 14 pounds.

Mia Yasmin Hernandez tipped the scales at 13 pounds, 13 ounces after her delivery Monday at San Luis Valley Hospital in Alamosa, Colorado. The newborn’s father, Francisco Garcia, said doctors had estimated the baby would weigh 8 pounds at birth.

Mia didn't seem especially large when she was born, Gracia said.

“She was swollen and everything” after delivery, he said. “I thought she was going to [weigh] 10 or 11 pounds.”

But after weighing Mia, the nurse told Garcia the infant’s weight.

“I was like, ‘Whoa, she’s the biggest baby I’ve ever seen,’” Garcia told ABC News.

Even hospital personnel agreed. Garcia said the nurse told hi she’d never seen “a baby that big.”

Dr. Robert Barbieri, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said in a previous interview about one out of 1,000 babies could weigh 11 pounds, and one out of every 100,000 could weigh 14 pounds. A 14-pound baby, he said, is extremely rare, because usually a doctor will induce labor if a baby appears oversize.

While Mia’s delivery via Caesarean section went smoothly, the infant developed breathing problems and was eventually moved to Children’s Hospital of Colorado in Aurora, Colorado, according to Garcia.

Garcia said Mia is on oxygen and doing well, although they’re not sure when she will get home.

Garcia said the couple has another four daughters at home, which might come in handy for new baby clothes.

“We bought her a lot of stuff like a newborn cap and pampers,” Garcia said. “They don't fit her. She’s too big.”

Source: http://abcnews.go.com

By Dennis Thompson

Already-strong public support for right-to-die legislation has grown even stronger in the days since the planned death of 29-year-old brain cancer patient Brittany Maynard, a new HealthDay/Harris Poll has found.

An overwhelming 74 percent of American adults now believe that terminally ill patients who are in great pain should have the right to end their lives, the poll found. Only 14 percent were opposed.

Broad majorities also favor physician-assisted suicide and physician-administered euthanasia.

Only three states -- Oregon, Washington and Vermont -- currently have right-to-die laws that allow physician-assisted suicide.

"Public opinion on these issues seems to be far ahead of political leadership and legislative actions," said Humphrey Taylor, chairman of The Harris Poll. "Only a few states have legalized physician-assisted suicide and none have legalized physician-administered euthanasia."

People responded to the poll in the weeks after Maynard took medication to end her life in early November.

Maynard moved from California to Oregon following her diagnosis with late-stage brain cancer so she could take advantage of the state's "Death With Dignity Act." Her story went viral online, with a video explaining her choice garnering nearly 11.5 million views on YouTube.

A "poster child for the movement," Maynard helped spark conversations that allowed people to put themselves in her shoes, said Frank Kavanaugh, a board member of the Final Exit Network, a right-to-die advocacy group.

"I think it is just a natural evolution over a period of time," Kavanaugh said of the HealthDay/Harris Poll results. "There was a time when people didn't talk about suicide. These days, each time conversations occur, people think it through for themselves, and more and more are saying, 'That's a reasonable thing to me.'"

The poll also found that:

• Support for a person's right to die has increased to 74 percent, up from 70 percent in 2011. Those opposed decreased to 14 percent from 17 percent during the same period.
• Physician-assisted suicide also received increased support, with 72 percent now in favor, compared with 67 percent in 2011. Opposition declined from 19 percent to 15 percent.
• Sixty-six percent of respondents said doctors should be allowed to comply with the wishes of dying patients in severe distress who ask to have their lives ended, up from 58 percent in 2011. Opposition decreased from 20 percent in 2011 to 15 percent now.

"The very large -- more than 4-to-1 and increasing -- majorities in favor of physician-assisted suicide, and the right of terminally ill patients to end their lives are consistent with other liberal social policy trends, such as support for same-sex marriage, gay rights and the decriminalization of marijuana, seen in the results of referendums and initiatives in the recent mid-term elections," Taylor said.

Support for the right-to-die movement cut across all generations and educational groups, both genders, and even political affiliation, the poll found.

Democrats tended to be more supportive of right-to-die legislation, but 56 percent of Republicans said they favor voluntary euthanasia and 63 percent favor physician-assisted suicide.

Kavanaugh was not surprised. "People think of this as a liberal issue. But I find that as I talk to [conservatives], you can appeal to them on the basis of 'get the government the hell out of my life,'" he said.

But the public is split over how such policies should be enacted, with 35 percent saying that the states should decide on their own while 33 percent believe the decision should be made by the federal government, the poll found.

"Most of the people I know in the field whose opinion I put stock in don't feel there's ever going to be federal movement on it," Kavanaugh said. "You're just going to have to suffer through a state-by-state process."

Kavanaugh does believe this overwhelming public support will result in steady adoption of right-to-die laws.

"I think this will become the ultimate human right of the 21st century, the right to die with dignity," he said. "There are good deaths and bad deaths, and it is possible to have a good death."

Despite increasing public support for assisted suicide, stiff opposition remains in some quarters.

"Assisted suicide sows confusion about the purpose of life and death. It suggests that a life can lose its purpose and that death has no meaning," Rev. Alexander Sample, archbishop of the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon, said in a pastoral statement issued during Maynard's final days.

"Cutting life short is not the answer to death," he said. "Instead of hastening death, we encourage all to embrace the sometimes difficult but precious moments at the end of life, for it is often in these moments that we come to understand what is most important about life. Our final days help us to prepare for our eternal destiny."

Todd Cooper, a spokesman for the Portland archdiocese, said the debate over assisted suicide touches him on a very deep level because of his wife, Kathie.

About 10 years ago, she also was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. She endured two brain surgeries, two years of chemotherapy and six weeks of radiation therapy, and remains alive to this day.

"If she'd given up the fight for life, she wouldn't be here," Cooper said. "That doesn't necessarily happen in every case, but it gives hope for those who struggle to the very end."

source: www.medicinenet.com

By Melissa Wirkus

“HIT has been shown to help some patients, but it has also been shown to perhaps provide some complications in care, or less than adequate care, when messages are not received, when messages are interrupted or when messages are routed to the inappropriate person,” explained Milisa Manojlovich, PhD, RN, CCRN, associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Nursing (UMSN) and member of U-M’s Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation.

Manojlovich will serve as the primary investigator on a new $1.6 million grant from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) that will focus on health IT’s effects on nurse–physician communication. Manojlovich and her co-investigators will look at how communication technologies make it easier or harder for doctors and nurses to communicate with each other. They hope their research will identify the optimal way to support effective communication while fostering improved and positive interdisciplinary team-based care.

Until the research is completed, Manojlovich offers some simple procedures clinicians can begin to adopt right now to help alleviate common problems with digital communication:

1.   Use multiple forms of technology  

Just like there is more than one way to treat a cold, there is more than one way to communicate electronically. Utilizing multiple forms of technology to communicate important information, or sometimes even reverting back to the “old-fashioned” ways of making a phone call or talking in person, can help ensure the receipt of a message in an environment that is often inundated.

“One of the things we are going to investigate is this idea of matching the message to the medium,” Manojlovich said. “So depending on the message that you want to send, you will identify what is the best medium to send that message.”

Using the current Ebola situation in Texas as an example, Manojlovich explained that using multiple forms of technology as a back-up to solely documenting the information in the EHR system could have mitigated the breakdown in communication that occurred. “Although the clinician did her job by entering the information into the EHR, she maybe should have texted or emailed the physician with the information or found someone to talk to in person about the situation. What we are trying to do with this study is see if there is another way that messages like this could have been transmitted better.”

2.   Include the whole message 

Reducing fragmented messages and increasing the aggregation of key data and information in communications may be one of the most critical pieces to improving communication between nurses and physicians. Manojlovich has been passionate about nurse–physician communication throughout her career and has conducted several previous studies on communication technologies.

“What we’ve noticed, for example, is that nurses will sometimes use the same form of communication over and over again. In one of the studies we actually watched a nurse page the same physician three times with the same question within an hour period.”

The physician did not answer any of the messages, and Manojlovich concluded it was because the pages were missing critical components of information related to the patient’s care plan. Increasing the frequency of communications can be beneficial, but only if the entire message and all important facets of information are relayed.

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’re going to get what you’ve always gotten. If you don’t alter or change the communication technology you are using, you are going to get the same results,” she added.

3.   Incorporate a team-based approach 

“At a really high level the problem is that a lot of these computer and electronic health record technologies are built with individuals in mind,” Manojlovich said. “When you talk about care process and team processes, that requires more interaction than the technologies are currently able to give us. The computer technologies are designed for individual use, but health care is based on the interaction of many different disciplines.”

Infusing this collaborative mindset into the “siloed” technology realm will undoubtedly help to improve the communication problems between providers and clinicians at all levels and all practice settings--which is especially important in today’s environment of co-morbidities and coordinating care.

Nurses play a critical role in improving communication as frontline care providers. “Nurses are the 24-hour surveillance system for hospitalized patients. It is our job to do that monitoring and surveillance and to let physicians know when something comes up.”

“I believe that for quality patient care, a patient needs input from all disciplines; from doctors, nurses, pharmacists, nutritionists--everyone,” Manojlovich said. “We are being trained separately and each discipline has a different knowledge base, and these differences make it difficult for us to understand each other. Developing mutual understanding is really important because when we have that mutual understanding I think outcomes are better and it can be argued that the quality of care is better when you have everyone providing input.”

Source: www.nursezone.com

BY CHIARA SOTTILE

Twice a day, Michele Forth drives 45 miles to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit to visit her 4-month-old baby she affectionately calls "Miss Madilyn." She is a 6-pound fighter in pink pajamas — but to her family and the nurses who care for her day and night, she is so much more.

"Hi, pumpkin! You just waking up?" Forth coos. Nurse Adrianna "Adri" Zimmerman, wearing purple scrubs and a warm smile, hands Madilyn to her father who is quickly surrounded by his wife and two young sons.

"She fights harder than any adult that I know, let alone a 6-pound baby," says father Shane Forth, softly stroking Madilyn's delicate left foot in his hand.

It was in that spirit that the nurses chose to see Madilyn, one of nearly 100 babies cared for in the NICU at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta every day. "We always talk about how feisty this one is or how sweet this one is,” Zimmerman says.

That bedside chatting took on a whole new life with a photo series called "From the NICU to the Moon" that imagines what the babies dream about as they wiggle and smile in their sleep, and what they might become someday. It also aims to educate parents about safe sleep for newborns.

The nurses and hospital communications team imagined Madilyn as a physician, surrounded by stethoscopes and Band-Aids. The photo series also features Brentley, the future astronaut, Arianna, the future chef, Sofia the ballerina, and Carolina as an Olympian.

Madilyn was born two months early and has what is called vacterl association (a collection of birth defects), resulting in multiple surgeries and months in the NICU. Zimmerman remembers Madilyn's arrival in the NICU like it was her own child.

"I think she's strong and she's definitely got the will to see whatever it is through to the end, so, if that happens to be med school in a few years, I would not be surprised," says Zimmerman. "It's funny how much personality these babies have."

And Mom is happy with the depiction. "Even though Miss Madilyn does have a whole bunch of obstacles ahead of her right now," she says, "she can do amazing things and she can aspire to be anything that she wants to be."

Carolina, the tiny Olympian, is “a strong-willed patient who has a lot of heart and she is letting nothing hold her back," says Jessica Wright, a NICU Nurse with 10 years of experience. "Just because they were born early doesn't mean they cannot do whatever they want when they grow up in life."

True to her athletic depiction, Carolina is hardly ever still in her crib. Gazing up at the green alligator and orange lion of her soother, Carolina playfully kicks her feet back and forth, her bright eyes fixed on Nurse Wright. "What are you thinking about?" Wright asks, her hand on Carolina's blue and pink ensemble, "You tell 'em about it, wiggle worm."

Sofia, the ballerina in the photo series, is also on the move. Since she was photographed, Sofia was able to leave the NICU and go home with her parents, Fred and Dawnyale "Dawny" Hill.

In the pale orange light of an Atlanta sunset, Fred and Dawny cradle their daughter in their arms on the family's front porch. It's Sofia's first time outside on the porch and her longest stint outside in the evening since she went home. "What do you think? What do you think? Hill asks his daughter, holding her hand. "Interesting, huh?"

Sofia spent 157 days, 20 hours, and 6 total minutes in NICUs. Respiratory and reflux issues keep this 5 1/2-month-old on an oxygen tank and feeding tube.

"She has some accessories, as we like to refer to them as," says Mr. Hill, about the oxygen tank and tubes. "They kind of travel with her."

But in the "NICU to the Moon" photos, Sofia left all the tubes behind for the stage and curtains. "It made her seem normal. The way the pictures kind of erased all of the cords. All of the tubes," says Hill of his daughter. "I saw the innocence of Sofia as opposed to my child in the NICU."

"She's got a family full of dancers on both sides so we definitely are excited to see Miss Sofia the ballerina come about," Dawny says with a laugh. "She'll be dancing around."

But for now, the Hills cherish moments with Sofia at home, like their evening bedtime routine. Mr. Hill carries Sofia on his chest while Dawny wheels the oxygen tank and other cords towards the bedroom. "Good holding your head, Sofia. Look at you," applauds Mrs. Hill.

As they gently place her on her back in her crib, Sofia rubs her eyes.

"Hey, you had a good day. You had a good day, right? Are you sleepy?" asks her father, the machine beeping and sighing next to the crib.

"Ready? Time to pray," Mr. Hill says, kneeling over the crib next to his wife. They pray for every organ in their daughter's body and give thanks to the doctors who helped bring her home.

"We will be keeping up our bedtime routine," Mrs. Hill says, looking at her husband. "Until she can start saying her prayers," he answers.

"Any child that has to go through that much opposition from day one, there's got to be something great for them to accomplish out of life, so my hope is that she accomplishes exactly what she was sent here to do," Mr. Hill says.

And with that, the bedroom light switches off and one more former NICU baby gets to dream of her future in her own crib.

Source: www.nbcnews.com

By Linda Carroll

As Jill Koziol turned away from her 8-month-old daughter to check on her toddler, the unthinkable happened. In a fraction of a second little Cate pulled herself up against the laundry hamper, grabbed a detergent pod and popped it into her mouth. 

Koziol heard a gagging sound, whipped around and was horrified to see the remains of the pod on the floor and Cate in obvious distress. 

"The next few moments were very chaotic with a screaming child, me crying and screaming to poison control to be heard over Cate's cries," the 34-year-old New Yorker said.

Within minutes Cate was vomiting and the Koziols were in an ambulance racing to the hospital.

Cate Koziol is hardly alone in her run-in with a detergent pod. A study published on Monday in Pediatrics finds that in 2012 and 2013 17,230 children under age 6 got into trouble with detergent pods. Most — nearly 80 percent — of the children were reported to have ingested a pod. Nearly two-thirds of the children were between 1 and 2 years old.

“The severity of these exposures varies,” said study coauthor Dr. Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. “Sometimes the chemicals get into the eyes, sometimes they are swallowed. And if they are swallowed, they can cause severe burns to the esophagus and the stomach.”

It shouldn’t be surprising that most of the problems involved 1- and 2-year-old kids putting pods into their mouths, Smith said.

“This is the age group where they explore the environment with their mouths,” he explained.

A big part of the problem is that the chemicals in the pods are more dangerous than those in traditional laundry detergents.

“I’ve been treating children for over 30 years in emergency departments,” Smith said. “And for decades if a child came in with a laundry detergent exposure it was usually no big deal. But these are different. They have strong concentrated chemicals in them. And that’s why it’s so important for parents to understand the dangers associated with their use.”

Smith and his colleagues found that among children exposed to the packets, about half were managed at home and 35 percent were treated and released from a health care facility. One child died.

“The concern we have is that in about 700 of these children — that’s a child every day in this country — they had to be admitted to the hospital,” Smith said, adding that some ended up in pediatric intensive care units either in a coma or unable to breathe without the help of mechanical ventilation.

Andrea Gielen, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy, hopes the new findings will be a wake up call for parents.  

“I think it is definitely intended to alert parents to a hazardous household product that they need to make sure is tucked away from where young children can access — much like other dangerous household products, said Gielen, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

In a statement the American Cleaning Institute said, “ACI and its member companies have directly engaged parents and caregivers, as well as poison control centers, pediatricians and other medical professionals, educators and social service providers in alerting them to the potential for childhood accidents involving these products.”

A recent survey by the institute suggests that many parents are unaware of the dangers. While 70% of those surveyed said they store household cleaners — such as dishwashing detergent and glass and toilet cleaners — safely and securely, just 34 percent reported properly storing their laundry pods in a cabinet or a cabinet with a lock, the ACI found. More worrisome, one out of six people admitted to taking no safety precautions at all when it came to storing laundry pods.

That wasn’t the case in the Koziol home. In the minutes before Cate got into trouble with one, Jill Koziol had taken a single pod down and set it on the family’s hamper to get everything ready for her husband to take to their apartment’s laundry room.

The Koziols’ experience is “a perfect example of how these things can happen in the blink of an eye,” Gielen said.

But Gielen said the onus isn’t just on parents. The new study should sound the alarm for product designers, too. “When you are designing a new product you need to be thinking about the most vulnerable part of the population and how it will interact with the product. In this case, it is kids,” she said

When the Koziols arrived at the emergency room, doctors decided to keep Cate there for observation. And it was a good thing they did. Within a couple of hours the little girl was wheezing and struggling to breathe. Her doctors decided to intubate her and Cate spent the next two days in the pediatric intensive care unit.

The whole experience was frightening, but Cate pulled through unscathed.

“Cate is back to normal, though mommy may never quite recover from the ordeal,” Koziol said.

Have you or someone you know dealt with a child who ate a laundry pod? If so, please share your experience.

Source: www.today.com

By Alana Horowitz

Brittany Maynard, the Oregon woman who had become an outspoken advocate for patients' rights following her terminal cancer diagnosis, died on Saturday, the Oregonian reported. She was 29.

"Goodbye to all my dear friends and family that I love," she wrote in a Facebook post, according to People. "Today is the day I have chosen to pass away with dignity in the face of my terminal illness... the world is a beautiful place, travel has been my greatest teacher, my close friends and folks are the greatest givers... goodbye world. Spread good energy. Pay it forward!"

Earlier this year, Maynard learned that she was suffering from an aggressive form of brain cancer called glioblastoma and had only six months to live. After hearing what the disease would to her body in its final stages, she decided that she wanted to die on her own terms.

Maynard and her family, including her husband Dan Diaz and her mother Debbie Ziegler, moved to Oregon,whose Death With Dignity Act has allowed hundreds of terminally ill people to end their lives by taking a medication prescribed by doctors. She picked November 1st as the day she wanted to die because it was after her husband's late October birthday.

Since then, Maynard had become a champion for the law and for patients in her situation, working with the group Compassion and Choices.

"I am not suicidal," she wrote in a blog post for CNN.com. "I do not want to die. But I am dying. And I want to die on my own terms."

On Wednesday, Maynard released a new video that suggested that she might consider postponing her death.

"If November 2nd comes along and I've passed, I hope my family is still proud of me and the choices I've made. If November 2nd comes along and I'm still alive, I know that we'll still be moving forward as a family out of love for each other, and that decision will come later."

Maynard recently crossed the last item off her bucket list: a trip to the Grand Canyon. Before she became ill, Maynard was an active traveler and adventurer who lived in Southwest Asia for a year and once climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

By Elizabeth Baier

Anyone who has spent much time in Minnesota's "Med City" can't help but notice that wheelchairs are everywhere.

From city parking ramps and downtown sidewalks to park trails and the local mall, the chairs have an inescapable presence.

More than likely that has do to with the fact that Rochester is home to Mayo Clinic, visited by thousands of patients every day. Many of them use wheelchairs to get around. So it's not surprising that they exist in big numbers.

The big curiosity is how they end up all over the city with their users nowhere in sight — a fact that some local residents can be oblivious to.

Denny and Carol Scanlan say empty wheelchairs are just part of the Rochester landscape.

"I never even thought of it until just now," Denny Scanlan says over a drink at American Legion Post 92, where he is a member. "Well, I see them kind of everywhere we go, I guess — where you least expect them."

"Yes," says his wife, with a laugh. "At the mall. In a restaurant. " She adds, "We're so used to it that I don't even notice it."

But some people do notice the big blue chairs.

At the Blue Water Salon on the skyway level of the Doubletree Hotel, owner Shelly Joseph often sees them just outside her door, in a public stairwell largely used by hotel staff.

"I don't know why they're in here, but randomly they're in this stairwell," she says. "It's a fire exit, basically."

At the Starbucks across the hall, manager Dawn Lee-Britt sees wheelchairs outside the employee entrance at the back of the coffee shop at least a couple of times a week.

"Sometimes we can't get out," she says. "I'm getting used to it because we see them so often." She adds: "It's like they don't need it anymore or it's time to go.

Mayo Clinic has 1,180 wheelchairs in its Rochester fleet, largely for patient transport. It loses up to 150 chairs each year, says general services manager Ralph Marquez, who oversees patient equipment.

At $550 each, that could be as much as $82,500 a year.

"Yes, it's a financial burden to us from that standpoint, but it's also a service we provide," Marquez says. "And if the patient, you know, truly comes first, sometimes that's the expense of the business."

Because the clinic does not want to keep patients from leaving the campus, the clinic's courier service rounds up wheelchairs weekly, mostly from hotels and other places that alert them.

But the chairs can travel much farther than that.

"We've gotten calls from Orlando Airport. Goodwill up in Duluth had one of our chairs and luckily we were able to retrieve that one. We've had them in Denver, out east in a few airports," Marquez says. "They get back to us dirty and needing to be cleaned. People may take them home for a while. They wind up everywhere."

That includes the Rochester Public Library, where communications manager John Hunziker considers wheelchairs normal.

"I'm sure if you aren't used to Rochester, seeing somebody going down the skyway, you know, pushing an IV on a rolling stand looks kind of weird," he says. "But it's just part of living in Rochester."

And on some days, part of Hunziker's job is to let the Mayo Clinic know there's a blue chair to pick up in the lobby.

Source: www.npr.org

A Department of Veterans Affairs initiative targeting staph infections in hospitalized patients has produced positive results, according to data released by the VA. 

Among VA patients in ICUs between 2007 and 2012, healthcare-associated MRSA infection rates dropped 72% — from 1.64 to 0.46 per 1,000 patient days. Infection rates dropped 66% — from 0.47 to 0.16 per 1,000 patient days — for patients treated in non-ICU hospital units.

“These results are striking,” Carolyn Clancy, MD, VA’s interim under secretary for health, said in a news release. “Healthcare-associated infections are a major challenge throughout the healthcare industry, but we have found in VA that consistently applying some simple preventive strategies can make a very big difference, and that difference is being recognized.”

VA’s prevention practices consist of patient screening programs for MRSA, contact precautions for hospitalized patients found to have MRSA, and hand hygiene reminders with hand sanitizer stations placed in common areas, patient wards and specialty clinics throughout medical centers, according to the release. Practices are reinforced via computerized reminders, training, measurement and continual feedback.

MRSA infections are a serious global healthcare issue and are difficult to treat because the bacterium is resistant to many antibiotics. In a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2012 MRSA surveillance report from its Active Bacterial Core surveillance, the CDC cites 75,309 cases of invasive MRSA infections and 9,670 deaths due to invasive MRSA in 2012, according to the release.

“The VA healthcare system is able to implement and assess these prevention strategies,” Martin Evans, MD, director of VA’s MRSA control program, said in the release. “What we’ve learned translates into better healthcare for the veterans we serve.”

Source: www.va.gov

By Eun Kyung Kim

James Wathen had stopped eating. Frail and barely able to speak, the 73-year-old whispered to a health care worker that he missed his dog, a one-eyed Chihuahua he hadn't seen since paramedics whisked him away to a Kentucky hospital weeks earlier. 

So a team of nurses hustled to learn the fate of Wathen's beloved pet, Bubba, hoping a reunion might provide some peace and comfort to their heartbroken and deteriorating patient — even if arranging one meant bending ahospital rule against pets.

A series of phone calls eventually led the nurses to the Knox-Whitley Animal Shelter, where Bubba was taken and placed with a foster family, said Mary-Ann Smyth, president of the non-profit facility.

Coincidentally, Bubba had also recently fallen ill.

"The dog quit eating a week ago, which is very strange," Smyth told TODAY.com. "The dog didn’t know where James was and James didn't know where the dog was and believe it or not, they both stopped eating at about the same time."

Plans were made to bring the little pooch, who lacked his bottom row of teeth along with his right eye, to the hospital over the weekend.

“He was so sad at first. We had him wrapped in a baby blanket and he was shivering,” Smyth said. “The minute we got about 20 steps from this guy’s room — I kid you not — his little head went up. His eyes got real bright and he was like a different dog.”

She says a similar transformation took place in Wathen during his roughly 30-minute hospital reunion Saturday with Bubba. 

"They didn’t think James was going to make it," she recalled being told during her initial visit to the hospital. “I was 10 feet from his bed and you could barely understand him because he was so hard to hear. The nurse had to lean up right against his face to hear what he was saying."

But he slowly perked up as his dog snuggled with him on his bed. By the time Bubba returned for a second visit Tuesday, visible changes were noticeable in both man and his best friend.

"He’s done a complete turnaround. He's speaking, he's sitting up, he’s eating. He doesn't look like the same guy," said Smyth, who didn't attend the second visit but saw Wathen in footage recorded by the shelter's director. "And the dog is eating and doing better now, too."

Baptist Health Corbin, the hospital treating Wathen, did not return repeated messages left by TODAY.com seeking comment.  

But nurse Kimberly Probus told WKYT-TV a team of nurses went looking for Bubba after "one of our social workers realized it was mourning the loss of the dog that was making our patient even worse and emotionally unhealthy."  

Smyth said she's not surprised at the healing power pets provide their owners.

"I hope this story will show to people the tremendous difference that animals can make in people’s lives," she said. She also hopes it will encourage people to think about rescuing pets from shelters like hers, which is rebuilding its facility after its previous home burned down in a fire last November.

“One of the biggest problems we face is the way some people think of animals. People just don’t see animals as creatures and beings, they see them as property,” she said. “I hope people understand they’re not 'its,' they’re 'beings.'”

Source: www.today.com