NursingLink

Television may be blamed for a litany of modern plagues but for one local woman it saved her life. Early this year, Patrice Broussard of Antelope was suffering from a mysterious ailment. Ping-ponging between doctors' appointments, she was losing hope with every physician's "I don't know what's wrong." As the mother of three sat on the couch one afternoon last January, ...

Efforts to require flu shots for health care workers in order to protect vulnerable patients are being abandoned by some major health systems because of legal challenges and vaccine shortages. Requiring flu shots is an exception in the health care industry, where 48% of workers were vaccinated against flu last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The ...

U.S. researchers say they found nurses who worked in hospital intensive care units may get less regular sleep than other nurses and may commit more errors. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston assessed the overall sleep quality and vigilance among intensive care unit nurses at the beginning and end of their shift. They compared their findings with similar measurements ...

The increase in demand may well put an end to a simmering policy dispute over the circumscribed role of nurse practitioners in medical care. If tens of millions of new patients enter the health care system, it seems clear that nurse practitioners will be needed to perform many of the tasks now performed by physicians. Nurse practitioners are registered nurses who ...

Swine Flu Twitter Chat with Jennifer Stephen: SWINE FLU QUESTION: Son has sickle cell...Does he qualify as high priority and where can I take him to get the shot? Nurse Stephen: He's definitely in the high priority group. He can get the shot at the local health department. #swineflu SWINE FLU QUESTION: If I had the swine flu earlier this year, ...

One of the animating principles (or should I say ideologies) of the Obama Administration’s health reform effort is the notion that Americans who have health insurance “like their insurance.”  To genuinely address the underlying problems in our health care system in ways even the President admits would be the most effective — like having some form of national, tax supported health ...

I recently wrote a letter to the president of the United States- Barack Obama. This letter was a plea to reexamine the proposed health care reform. There is  a better way to rectify our fractured "unhealthy" system. He responded with a form letter that, in essence, gave himself a "pat on the back" for his proposed plan. I would like to ...

Rhode Island Hospital, based in Providence, has been fined $150,000 by the Rhode Island Department of Health after a surgeon operated on the wrong finger of a patient last month. Among the ramifications, the hospital will have to install video cameras in all of its operating rooms and all surgeries will have to be watched by a clinical professional, not on ...

On a scale of zero to ten, how often do you wish you could somehow wave a magic wand and know how much pain your patient is in—zero being never and ten being every day? Four? Ten? Twenty? ER Doc Brady Pregerson and Nurse Rebekah are ready to “go there” in the first of a four-part series on pain management. Dr. ...

ER doc Brady Pregerson and Nurse Rebekah perform a raid and bust on that sketchy personality, the “Candyman.” Why does he exist? And what is he thinking? In Part I of our Pain Management series, we looked at the challenge of gauging your patient’s pain. In this article, we examine the many consequences of taking a too-easy approach to a complex ...

Let’s face it: We’ve all doubted certain patients’ complaints of pain. We’ve all wondered whether their “pain” was really a not-so-cleverly disguised cry for a cheap fix. So how do you know if your patient is in pain—or just wants drugs? In Part I and Part II of our Pain Management series, ER doc Brady Pregerson and Nurse Rebekah Child examined ...

Because of its size and cost, Medicaid has been called the "workhorse" of the U.S. health system. Now it's front and center in the debate on overhauling the U.S health system and expanding coverage to the uninsured. With 60 million enrollees, Medicaid dwarfs other insurance programs, including its cousin, Medicare, which covers 44 million elderly and disabled people. Do you ...

With an ability to think quickly, act decisively and stay calm when lives are at stake, critical-care nurses are among the in-demand healthcare professionals who make life-or-death decisions about patient care every day. Critical-care nurses treat patients at high risk for actual or potential life-threatening health problems and also tend to the emotional well-being of those patients' families. That's no small ...

John Stevenson hasn't stopped patronizing the local gym, but after his workout, he is wiping down his machines with spray disinfectant and paper towels. Sales associate Janet Lininger is having customers swipe their own credit cards (she's relieved to have recently shifted from the intimate-apparel section to the far-less-cozy handbag department). In ways both discreet and direct, serious and silly, Americans ...

This week's questions focus on the House Democrats' health care bill unveiled Thursday by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Q: Would the House Democrats' bill raise my taxes more than the other bills making their way through Congress? A: It depends on your income. The House bill would impose a "surcharge" on individuals who make more than $500,000 and couples who make ...

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — A New York meat company has recalled almost 546,000 pounds of ground beef because it may be contaminated with a bacteria that has caused illness and one death, according to health officials. The meat sold by Ashville, N.Y.-based Fairbank Farms was linked to cases of E. coli-related illness in Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture ...

WASHINGTON — People who used the calorie information available at fast-food chain restaurants in New York City bought 106 fewer calories' worth of food at lunch than those who didn't see or use the information, a study shows. Researchers at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene set out to analyze the impact of the city's menu labeling ...

October 29 2009 Los Angeles pharmaceutical billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong announced plans Wednesday to provideUniversity of California regents with a $100-million guaranty underwriting the county's latest proposal to reopen long-troubled Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital by 2012. 

Children on widely used psychiatric drugs can quickly gain an alarming amount of weight; many pack on nearly 20 pounds (9 kilograms) and become obese within just 11 weeks, a study found