February 3rd, 2017 by Dr. Val Jones in True Stories
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Even though I don’t have an outpatient practice, I like to keep in touch with some of my patients after they’ve discharged from the rehab hospital. Jack is one of my very favorite success stories.
I met Jack in a small regional hospital in rural western America. He had been admitted with sudden onset weakness, and during the intake process, accurately described his daily evening cocktail habit. Unfortunately, this led the clinicians down the wrong diagnostic pathway, presuming that alcohol withdrawal seizures were the cause of his weakness (due to a presumed “post-ictal” state).
A brain MRI was unremarkable, and so a fairly high loading dose of anti-seizure medications were started. Poor Jack happened to be very sensitive to meds, and reacted with frank psychosis. Days later he was still not in his right mind, and so a rehab consult was requested for “encephalopathy due to alcohol withdrawal.”
When I met Jack, it was clear on first glance that… [click here to read the rest of the story] or go to this link:
http://cliniciantoday.com/when-its-more-important-to-save-a-lifestyle-than-a-life/
June 16th, 2011 by Bryan Vartabedian, M.D. in Opinion
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This post from Kelly Young on Howard Luks’ blog asks when patients cross the line with respect to their own advocacy. It’s worth a peek.
The question of boundaries between doctor and patient is interesting. All of my patients are empowered in some way. The extent and level of that empowerment is personal. On our own there are few lines and little with respect to boundaries. We have effectively unlimited access to information and resources. And how far we go to look after ourselves and our kids has few limits.
But when we enter into a relationship with a provider, we’re no longer alone. It’s unreasonable for a provider to tell a patient Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*
May 10th, 2011 by BarbaraFicarraRN in Health Tips
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Thanks to Laura Landro for shining light on unsafe injections in her WSJ blog, “Unsafe Injection Practices Persist Despite Education Efforts.”
Landro writes:
“A new push is underway to eliminate unsafe injection practices, which remain a persistent safety problem despite years of efforts to educate clinicians about the risks of re-using needles, syringes and drug vials.
In the U.S., failure to follow safe practices in delivering intravenous medications and injections has resulted in more than 30 outbreaks of infectious disease including hepatitis C, and the notification of more than 125,000 patients about potential exposure just in the last decade, according to health-care purchasing alliance Premier Inc.”
As a registered nurse this is unthinkable. Learning to administer injections safely is “patient care 101.” There is no excuse for any health care professional to unsafely inject patients.
Patients in the hospital, ambulatory surgical centers or outpatient settings, should expect that their nurses, doctors and other clinicians are administering injections safely. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Health in 30*
March 9th, 2011 by LouiseHBatzPatientSafetyFoundation in Health Policy, True Stories
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This is a guest post by Dr. Julia Hallisy.
Serious infections are becoming more prevalent and more virulent both in our hospitals and in our communities. The numbers are staggering: 1.7 million people will suffer from a hospital-acquired infections each year and almost 100,000 will die as a result.
When our late daughter, Kate, was diagnosed with an aggressive eye cancer in 1989 at five months of age, our life became consumed by doctor visits, MRI scans, radiation treatments, chemotherapy — and fear. My husband and I assumed that our fight was against the ravages of cancer, but almost eight years later we faced another life-threatening challenge we never counted on — a hospital-acquired infection. In 1997, Kate was infected with methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in the operating room during a “routine” 30-minute biopsy procedure to confirm the reoccurrence of her cancer.
Kate’s hospital-acquired infection led to seven weeks in the pediatric intensive care unit on life support, the amputation of her right leg, kidney damage, and the loss of 70 percent of her lung capacity. While most infections are not this serious, the ones that are often lead to permanent loss of function and lifelong disabilities. In the years since Kate’s infection, resistant strains of the bacteria have emerged and now pose even more of a threat since they can be impossible to treat with our existing arsenal of antibiotics.
Patients afflicted with MRSA will often have to contend with the threat of recurrent infections for the rest of their lives. These patients live in constant fear of re-infection and often struggle with feelings of vulnerability and helplessness. Family members, friends, and co-workers may not fully understand the facts and have nowhere to turn for education about risks and prevention. Loved ones may worry unnecessarily for their own safety, which can cause them to distance themselves from someone who desperately needs their presence and support.
We have the knowledge and the ability to prevent a great number of these frightening infections, but the busy and fragmented system in which healthcare is delivered doesn’t encourage adequate infection control measures, and patients continue to be at risk. A significant part of the problem is that the public doesn’t receive timely and accurate information about the detection and prevention of MRSA and other dangerous organisms, and they aren’t engaged as “safety partners” in the quest to eliminate infections. Read more »
March 9th, 2011 by DrWes in Opinion, True Stories
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On September 27, 2010, the peer-reviewed scientific journal Europace published online-before-print a case report entitled “Spontaneous explosion of implantable cardioverter-defibrillator” by Martin Hudec and Gabriela Kaliska. In the pdf of that case report a figure containing a color photo of the affected patient’s chest, chest X-ray, and two pictures of the extracted device (one seen here) were included.
The pictures and case presentation were dramatic and the case very rare. Both were perfect reasons to report such an important case to the medical literature. And so these doctors sent the case to Europace on June 29, 2010, and the article was accepted after revision on August 16, 2010, with the article appearing online September 27, 2010.
The authors must have felt very proud to have an article published relatively quickly, and the editors and reviewers of Europace must have thought the case was unique enough and important enough to have the article revised according to their specifications, then published online — until I reported the case on this blog on October 5, 2010, and included images from a portion of the case report’s figure.
Remarkably, later that same day, Europace removed the case report from its website without comment. The article simply vanished. I attempted to e-mail the editor of Europace to inquire about the reason for the retraction but received no reply, so I contacted the lead author, Martin Hudec, M.D. He kindly responded and I included his email response in the comments to my post two days later. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
