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The Lance Armstrong Foundation, which funds programs that assist people living with cancer, has become known for its bright yellow elastic LIVESTRONG wristbands. But the Morton Plant Mease Health Care hospitals in Florida recently voiced concerns that the LIVESTRONG bracelet on a patients arm could be confused with the yellow plastic bracelets the hospitals use to indicate a patient has opted for do-not-resuscitate status.
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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) consensus panel on end-of-life care convened in December 2004, and among the conclusions reached by the panel of experts on death and palliative care is that medicine knows too little about the process of dying.
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A decision by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to expand Medicare coverage of costly implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) will increase the number of Medicare beneficiaries eligible for an ICD by one-third, to nearly 500,000, and will require beneficiaries to release details about their cases to a database shared by hospitals.
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Questions surrounding resuscitation and other heroic measures, surrogacy, and withdrawal of futile care are complicated enough, but they can be even more complex when the patient is unidentified.
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Companies offering full-body computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans frequently make unsubstantiated claims about what the scans can do, but rarely give information about the limitations and risks of the tests.
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Nurses who smoke experience feelings of guilt and embarrassment and also might be less likely to intercede with patients to encourage them to quit smoking because they feel to do so would be hypocritical.
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Are Im sorry really the magic words? According to a coalition of doctors, hospitals, attorneys, and patients, a lesson most of us learned as toddlers could be the key to stemming the flood of medical malpractice lawsuits in the United States.
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You may think your hospital is doing a good job of preventing common errors that result in patient deaths, but the American Medical Asso ciation (AMA) and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) think you can do better. In fact, they think hospitals in the United States can save 100,000 lives between now and June 2006.
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The link between a persons religion or spirituality and physical condition is one that has gained increasing recognition and consideration in health care discussions, and hospital chaplains have been in the thick of the debate.
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Its illegal, it may undermine international treaties, and there are warnings that patient safety is at risk but for many, the cost savings of buying re-imported drugs outweighs all the arguments against it.
