In a study published this week in The Lancet, a British research team found that surgical stockings given to stroke patients for prevention of blood clots do not work, reports Sam Lister of UK’s Times. The compression stockings provide graduated pressure and should reduce swelling in the legs. Studies have shown that, for patients immobilized….
Continue ReadingStandard of Care--Hospitals
Private Rooms in Hospitals Are for Safety, Not Just Luxury
Time was when you had to pay a lot extra to get a private room in a hospital, and the single room was thought to be a luxury for patients. But now research has been accumulating that the private room can play a big role in safety: cutting the risk of infection, helping the patient….
Continue ReadingHeart Failure: An Expensive Revolving Door
Nobody wants to go home from the hospital only to be readmitted within a few weeks. But that revolving door is very common in conditions like heart failure, where the patient’s heart muscle doesn’t pump effectively after it has been weakened by heart attack or other heart disease. The open secret of the hospital industry….
Continue ReadingStroke: New Ideas for Delivering the Known Effective Therapies to Patients
Strokes cause more disability than just about any other disease, but they don’t have to. Effective treatments are known for the most common type of stroke; delivering them to the right patients has proven to be difficult. Now a group of researchers is proposing some changes in how stroke care is organized, with the hope….
Continue Reading“Back in the Hospital Again” — A Result of Fragmented, Uncoordinated Care
Getting a loved one home from the hospital is always a relief for both patient and family, but the weeks immediately after hospital discharge are fraught with peril, as many families don’t discover until the patient has to be readmitted for a new problem. This is especially common with Medicare patients: an alarming one in….
Continue ReadingMaking Surgery Safer by Using Checklists
An international research team has shown that death and complication rates from surgery can be dramatically improved by using simple checklists to make sure that safety measures are taken before, during and after each operation. The research project, involving nearly 8,000 patients at eight hospitals around the world, was done as part of the World….
Continue ReadingHospital Patients: Know The Color of Your Bracelet
Hospitals have long used color-coded bracelets as shorthand to communicate patients’ needs to doctors and nurses. For instance, a purple bracelet might indicate that a terminally ill patient does not wish to be resuscitated in the event of heart failure. Now there is a movement to standardize bracelets, preventing confusion when a health care worker….
Continue ReadingThe Biggest Risks You Face in the Hospital
Forbes Magazine has an informative article on the frequency of hospitals making mistakes while caring for patients, pointing out that 1.5 million Americans fall victim to such errors every single year. Some of these errors occur through sheer carelessness: for example, 100,000 people a year die from “superbugs,” bacteria that are resistant to available antibiotics…..
Continue ReadingHospital Death Rates Available Online
USA Today has published the government’s best estimates of death rates due to heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia for every American hospital for the past two years. The article has links to the pages where the death rates are published. As USA Today points out, this information was previously inaccessible to most patients. From….
Continue ReadingDoctor-Patient Relationships Turn Sour
Tara Parker-Pope recently had an article on how fewer and fewer patients trust their doctors. About one in four patients feel that their physicians sometimes expose them to unnecessary risk, according to data from a Johns Hopkins study published this year in the journal Medicine. And two recent studies show that whether patients trust a….
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