admin's blog

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The Excellent Care for All Act was passed by the legislature yesterday and upon Royal Assent will
make health care providers and executives accountable for improving patient care. The
legislation requires health care organizations, starting with hospitals, to:

• Develop and make public annual quality improvement plans
• Create quality committees to report to each board on quality related issues, including the
  public annual quality improvement plan
• Link executive compensation to quality plan performance improvements
  

When D., a woman in her mid-30s, learned that she was dying from complications of AIDS, she fully expected that her life would end in much the same way it had been lived: homeless, alone and among strangers.

If it hadn’t been for Dr. Jason K. Alexander, a medical student at the time, she might have been right.

Two years earlier Dr. Alexander, along with four other classmates, had created a project that paired medical students with patients who were dying alone. “We wanted to reach out to patients who had been shunned, the people others didn’t want to deal with,” Dr. Alexander recently recalled.

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This recent article from Healthzone.ca, by reporter Susan Pigg, sheds light on the confusion faced by many while attempting to navigate the Ontario health care system, especially during times of need.

Maria Freda could barely eat or sleep during the weeks her 77-year-old mother languished in a hospital bed, deemed too frail to return to her daughter’s east-end home, but not sick enough for the constant care of nurses and doctors.

A story From Pulse: voices from the heart of medicine

I'm a third-year medical student, and I'm starting the second day of my new rotation--a month that I'll spend with a family physician, Dr. Bauer, in his small, efficient home-based office.

Study highlights impact of patient preferences on race disparity in surgeons’ recommendations for joint replacement.

A recent study by researchers at the VA Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, suggests that patient treatment preferences play an important role in racial disparities in total joint replacement utilization observed in the US. Different attitudes toward total joint replacement procedures held by African American and white patients explained racial disparities in whether orthopedic surgeons recommended the procedure to patients. These findings¹ by Dr. Leslie Hausmann, from the VA, and her colleagues, are published online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine², published by Springer.

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The hospitalist is one of America's fastest-growing medical specialties. A physician-administrator, the hospitalist takes over where overburdened clinical doctors leave off; following patients through the system from entry to discharge — they are largely credited with reducing the length of hospital stays by anywhere from 17 to 30 percent, and reducing costs by 13 to 20 percent, according to studies in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

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(Garrison, NY) The consent forms that people sign before participating in research are widely considered difficult to understand and sometimes inaccurate. The lack of clarity was implicated in a high-profile legal settlement in April between Arizona State University and a Native American tribe, which claimed that blood samples that its members provided for genetic research were used for purposes not stated in the consent form. Efforts have been made to improve the forms, but how effective are they?

A wireless monitoring system for people with debilitating conditions such as Parkinson's disease or chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) could allow healthcare workers to assess a patient's health and the development of their disease without hindering their movements. Details of the system are reported in the International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology.