Word: patients
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Some 20,000 patients are killed every year by infections they pick up in America's hospitals. What made Strunk's case particularly significant was her husband's contention that Strunk died largely because the hospital staff members to whom she described her distress were not registered nurses but "patient-care technicians" who lacked the expertise to interpret her complaints. In 1994, the year of Strunk's operation, the Christ Hospital had turned to what management consultants call "patient-focused care," a system in which such bedside tasks as taking vital signs and answering call buttons are performed by unlicensed...
...doctors on how to avoid and defend malpractice suits. "Nursing involves all kinds of subtle perceptions. If you say, 'I'm coughing. I feel anxious' to a registered nurse, that means pulmonary embolism. Try that on a para-something-or-other who's been trained for six months." Nevertheless, patient-focused care is becoming the staffing pattern of choice throughout the country. Facing reduced reimbursements from Medicare, Medicaid and managed-care plans, hospitals must cut labor costs to survive. And nurses don't come cheap...
...West Coast, unions and consumer groups have put two versions of a Patient Protection Act on November's ballot. Propositions 214 and 216 would require the state to enforce minimum staffing levels for licensed personnel at all medical facilities and would protect whistle-blowing health-care workers from being fired. Similar measures have been introduced throughout the country, from the U.S. Congress to the Cincinnati city council, but nowhere does the battle loom larger than in California. A coalition led by the health-care industry and the Chamber of Commerce has mounted a multimillion-dollar ad campaign to defeat...
Bayne took full advantage of the new technology that Sunday morning in Point Loma. Although he could not feel a pulse at his patient's wrist, he was able to determine that it had fallen from a normal 80 beats a minute to 38 by placing a digital pulse monitor the size of a lemon on the woman's finger. He then touched her chest with a portable EKG machine and analyzed her cardiac rhythms. Had there been any indication that she was suffering a heart attack, Bayne would immediately have called 911. When he determined that wasn...
Questioning his patient, Bayne finally deduced that a prescription drug she was taking had caused her heart to slow, decreasing the flow of oxygen to her brain and sending her into a faint. That settled, he administered a stimulant called atropine to strengthen her heartbeat. Total elapsed time from pew to recovery: eight minutes, just about as long as it would have taken to get her to the emergency room in an ambulance...