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According to a commentary that appears in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), two Harvard doctors believe that severely obese children should be placed in foster care.
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About 25% of all Americans who are dying are veterans. Yet only 4% of dying veterans die within the Veterans Affairs (VA) Healthcare Network; most veterans are cared for by hospice and healthcare professionals in the community.
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An in-depth review of consent forms provided to volunteers for HIV/AIDS research in the United States and abroad about study procedures, risks, and benefits has found that the forms were extremely long and used wording that might have been complex enough to hinder full understanding, according to bioethicists at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD.
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Effective communication is critical to the successful delivery of healthcare services. The Joint Commission supports a number of efforts to improve communication between healthcare professionals and patients.
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A patient should be educated with several topics when diagnosed with asthma, says Marc Riedl, MD, assistant professor of medicine, Division of Clinical Immunology and Allergy at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. They include the following:
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At the University of Washington Medical Center (UWMC) in Seattle, educators ask inpatients how they prefer to learn and document that information on the electronic medical record, when there is no protocol for accommodating the patients' preferences. These actions are futile, members of the Patient and Family Education Committee complain.
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Children's Medical Center in Dallas found families were making repeated visits to the emergency department seeking treatment for a child with an asthma attack. These children were being admitted to the hospital repeatedly. To address the problem, the Asthma Management Program was initiated in 2001.
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The Library of Non-Traditional Patient Education Tools is an ongoing project hosted by Patient and Family Education Services at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle. It is an ongoing tracking system of educational tools to teach patients of various learning styles such as hearing, seeing, and hands-on.
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At Barnes-Jewish Hospital's Center for Diversity and Cultural Competence, St. Louis, MO, the Daylight program trains volunteers recognized and influential women from local refugee and immigrant communities to provide to their peers culturally sensitive information about breast health and breast cancer, including early detection methods. The program has been profiled by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
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Most patient education managers would agree that a system for documenting understanding of the teaching that takes place is important. Yet there is not a cookie-cutter method that institutions follow.
