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Last week we talked about technology in the news and medical and healthcare technology specifically. There’s a new rapid blood test that has been developed.  It’s experimental.  It’s still in the research stages but it seems promising that could distinguish between viral and a bacterial infection in as little as 2 hours.

Now, we all know right now you take a culture on a patient, you’re waiting 24 to 48 hours for that culture to develop to determine if this patient has a bacterial or a viral infection.  When we’re talking about bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics, the prevalence of drug resistant infectious illnesses we really need to start thinking about how we can alleviate the needless use of antibacterials when we don’t need to use them.  Identifying the potential cause of an infection earlier is better.

Right now we all know this is what happens.  You go in, complain of a real severe sore throat, is it bacterial? Is it viral?  It could be, probably viral but we’re not sure.” They’ll give you prescription for antibiotics, go ahead and do a culture or maybe you can do a rapid strep in the shop maybe you can’t.  Some insurance won’t accept it.  So you end up doing a standard throat culture, sending it out and you wait 1 to 2 days, get the results back.  Meanwhile the patient’s been taking antibiotics. So we need to try to get around this.

I’m really excited by this particular development.  It’s been researches in Israel they said they’ve developed a test they need to confirm their findings but the test seems to rely on the chemical luminescence factor of some cells.  What they found was that different types of white blood cells had been developed and actually luminesces in a different way when put under certain types of light.  This is pretty neat because some white blood cells are specific for bacteria and some white blood cells are specific for viruses.  If you can distinguish between the two, let’s say, and this is very simplistic but let’s say one glows red, one glows blue if you get under a culture and look and most for the white blood cells are blue then you’ve got a virus.  If glows to the white blood cells are red, you’ve got bacteria.  And that’s something that you can identify pretty quickly because the body is already responding to the infection.  There’ll going to be some things that may negate or reduce the effectiveness of this. You can think of anything that would reduce a person’s white blood cell count leukaemia, perhaps HIV, other things like that but you certainly can see how this could be very useful in a broad population in combating the overuse of antibiotics.  So I was pretty intrigued by this. I’ll be looking forward to hopefully this developing into a product that we hopefully will see here in the next few years and can be brought to market and be effective.

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This article has been featured in the news segment of the Nursing Show podcast episode Katrina Lawsuit and Hospital Preparedness Discussion Part 2 and Episode 191

Last week we talked about these new medical devices that could be applied similar to a temporary tattoo with just water adhering to the skin and monitoring vital signs used to monitor like your EKG lead would without the wires.  All of these things are pretty exciting. However, there are some findings and this has not to do with those temporary tattoos but in a related article in relation to tattoos at least.  We have an article here talking about the fact that there seems to be a particular skin infection that is cropping up around actual tattoos that are much more common.  It seems to be more common in people with compromised immune system but if you’re a person who’s getting a tattoo, you may want to be aware that this is something that seems to be made perhaps resistant to typical sterilization techniques or at least maybe ineffective sterilization techniques is a better way to put it.  There’ve been two reported cases that have been published in the Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal and they are looking at mycobacterium haemophilum skin infections associated with tattoo parlor customers.  It seems to be the first time this has been linked together.

So what does this mean?  Does this mean tattoos are inherently dangerous?  No!  But there is an increased risk factor when you’re getting a tattoo associated with a variety of different things:  Infections such as hepatitis C and other things when the materials used to do the tattoo are not adequately prepared, are not single-use devices or not cleaned effectively so a lot of things can lead to that.  Some people want to do their own tattoo.  So you can see where this can just become a cascading problem.  Certainly you want to encourage your patients and yourself to use reputable, well-maintained tattoo parlors, businesses that have been around for a while that looked like they are maintained well, that equipment is clean.

Tattoos are very prevalent in our culture now and they’ll going to be likely more prevalent.  But just like you wouldn’t go into a place and eat when the place was filthy inside, you probably don’t want to go to a similar place that does tattoos if you get what I mean.  So you want to pick a place that’s got a god reputation, that’s well maintained and that seems to be kept in a clean and aseptic technique when applying for tattoos.

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This article has been featured in the news segment of the Nursing Show podcast episode Katrina Lawsuit and Hospital Preparedness Discussion Part 2 and Episode 191

I want to start off with an article that was a press release released by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.  Just a disclaimer a lot of you probably know, I do produce the Nursing Notes Live program twice a month for the Johnson and Johnson Campaign for Nursing Future.  I’m really happy to be able to do that with them and enjoy working on them on that project with them.  I just want to let you know Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and all that Johnson is the same as Johnson and Johnson.  They’re affiliated in some loose way and I wanted to let you know that but it doesn’t mean that I can’t talk about good things like the nurse fellowships that are set up by the Robert Wood Foundation that are offered as three-year fellowships for nurse leaders that are really selected through a very important process.

One hundred and thirty eight applicants came in this year.  They offered 21 of them fellowships.  This is in response to the Institute of Medicine report talking about the Future of Nursing Leading Change in Advancing Health.  The whole idea of this is that nurses should be actively involved in influencing and advancing healthcare in United States.  The Institute of Medicine report said that “Nurses should be allowed and encouraged to operate at their full scope of practice that they should be actively involved in the changes and updates and upgrades to our healthcare systems.”  This is the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Nurse Fellow Program really setup for encouraging and building new nurse leaders throughout the country.  So it’s very exciting.

There are 21 nurses listed here from all over the spectrum of nursing and leadership.  I would encourage you to take a look at this list and maybe for next year think about somebody that you might encourage to apply for this fellowship program.  Perhaps even yourself.  This is something that’s very important that we support that we know who this people are and that we continue to build our core cadre of nurse leaders that are going to lead nursing here in the 21^st century and beyond.  So I’m really excited by this type of initiative and I hope you are as well.

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This article has been featured in the news segment of the Nursing Show podcast episode Katrina Lawsuit and Hospital Preparedness Discussion Part 2 and Episode 191

This article has been released based on hurricane Katrina.  Now this happened many years ago and yet we’re still having fall out from that.  Many of you may remember the case against the doctor and two nurses for euthanizing patients following the disaster when their patients were trapped in the hospital with health care professionals without resources, without electricity, without any hope of being evacuated and eventually the doctor and nurses were exonerated and basically all charges were dropped following this even civil charges against them were dropped based on the fact that it was a disaster situation.  However a class-action suit was brought against the hospital system.  This was a for-profit hospital that was Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans owned by Tenet Healthcare Operation.  There was a law suit brought against them on behalf of a class action including 187 patients and 800 visitors that were trapped in the hospital four days following the Katrina disaster.  They eventually have settled.  It was going to trial but the settlement came out.  A $25million to patients and visitors and of course lawyers and court cost will come out of that first but probably about a half of it will we divided up among them somehow.  I think they are going to come up with some kind of a mediator that will figure who gets owed, what and how much.  Forty-five bodies were removed from that hospital and to make shift more evade set up there following the disaster that people died as a result of being unable to be treated or evacuated effectively following this.  The law suit had alleged that the hospital system did not take reasonable and adequate steps to keep themselves prepared in the case of a disaster and not adequately prepared to evacuate people in case of a disaster.

There’s a lot of things that’s go into this. Rather than hush out too much of it I just want to point out that the articles in the shownotes and this law suit has been settled but there’s a lot of fallout associated with this law suit specifically over what it means to every other hospital out there.  Now, think about this, hurricane Katrina was a very unusual disaster certainly not predictable. You could put that on a scale and certainly hurricane Katrina was one of the more severe situations that occurred and perfect storm of events.  However, what would happen in your area if similar perfect storm of events were to come along associated with a disaster that might occur around you? We all live in places where some sort of disaster could occur.  In the Midwest perhaps a complete series of tornadoes one after the other that hindered all emergency response day after day after day from a series of severe storms, that could happen.  We’ve seen a lot of tornadoes this year in the Midwest that have caused severe havoc including some that have struck at specific hospitals.  Think about what happened in Japan this past year with the earthquake, the tsunami and then the radioactive fallout.  So there’s a lot to be thought about here because how will this affect your hospital?   Are you prepared for this worst case scenario to occur?  Would your hospital be able to withstand the scrutiny of the hind sight that comes along after every one of these events where everybody goes what have you should have known, right?  So there’s a lot of discussion about the danger associated with this very broad precedent setting decision and settlement.

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This article has been featured in the news segment of the Nursing Show podcast episode Katrina Lawsuit and Hospital Preparedness Discussion Part 1 and Episode 190.