Lifeline for Patientline
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Mobiles can upset hospital equipment A new study published in Critical Care indicates that the signal generated by mobile phones can interfere with hospital equipment, even to the point of inhibiting its function, from a range of up to three meters.â¦
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It's a new way to push for patient safety: Don't pay hospitals when they commit certain errors. Medicare will start hitting hospitals where it hurts in October, and other insurers are hot on the trail
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waiting in lines, calling every clinic in town, even going to Canada. But in Minnesota, the opposite problem has emerged: even people
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A terminal leukemia patient must have daily blood transfusions or die. A family begs doctors to do everything possible to keep their elderly mother alive. Parents cannot accept their newborn baby will not survive.
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Patricia Dugas reached out, touched Kevin Everett's arm and asked her son if he could feel her hand. Everett &#151; lying in a hospital bed, barely awake and hooked to life support systems &#151; nodded yes.
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CHICAGO -- Hundreds of hospitals around the country are joining the most ambitious project ever undertaken to give faster emergency room care to people suffering major heart attacks.
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Sometimes the numbing effect of TV can be helpful. Especially if you're a kid being stuck with a needle at the hospital.
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Waiting in line is part of life in post-storm New Orleans, especially when it comes to health care.
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THURSDAY, June 21 (HealthDay News) -- A programmable device that allows professional caregivers to monitor how patients dispense their medications has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the agency said Thursday.
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U.S. News & World Report - Just check in with the patient and let me know how she did overnight, my resident instructed me. A straightforward task, I thought, but still, nothing comes easy the first days on the hospital wards as a third-year student. I peered into the room and saw my patient cradled in her mother's arms. An 11-month-old who recently arrived from Guam, she had a raging ear infection. Her mother looked weary from the long nights. What could I offer? More immediately, where to begin?
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I hope the Republicans come prepared to debate health care this year, and they leave the platitudes and slogans home.  Enough of us have been seriously sick, or know someone who has, or have family members who have been or are now. The way the Republicans describe health care, it's as if they've never been through it or don't know anyone who has. I got some pushback, not much, from a casual mention of universal health care a few days ago. Some think the problem can be solved through the "private sector" but that's nonsense. There is no such thing in health care. It's not a free market, as anyone who's been through it can tell you. There's nothing free about it. (Free as in freedom, not as in free beer.) When you check into a hospital you turn over your whole being to the health care system. I can't imagine anything changing that, nor do I think it should. When you're dangerously ill, decisions must be made about you. To people who have never relinquished control, it's a big trip, because that's what you have to do. You spend huge amounts of time waiting. You can't sleep because hospitals are 24-by-7. You're much more likely to get an infection in a hospital, and infection on top of other disease can kill. Even so, people are treated and some even are cured by the system. Lives are definitely prolonged, pain is eased.  Whether we have universal health care or not, it won't change the basics of how health care works, and how unfair it is to be sick and fighting for your life. But there are some things we can change, and if you have a heart, and think about it, I don't see how anyone could be against universal health care and still sleep at night. One commenter said that no one is ever turned away from an emergency room, as if that's all there was to health care.  First, emergency rooms do turn people away, and some of them die. But most disease is not treated in emergency rooms. If you need drugs to treat cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, AIDS, heart disease, depression, arthritis, emphysema, to name a few common chronic diseases -- you're out of luck if you don't have insurance. You could die years before you would with treatment, or might suffer, where if you had good insurance, you wouldn't.  I'm lucky I have good health insurance. It's lucky that I lived in Massachusetts when my COBRA policy expired, it's the one state in the US that has liberalized health insurance. I'm lucky that I can afford the monthly payments. I'm lucky. But why should getting the care and treatment you need depend on luck? We can do so much better. And I think our country would do better with a healthy population that knows if they, or someone they love, got sick they'll the help they need. It'll be interesting to see if we can get McCain to talk about this, if he turns out to be the Republcan nominee. The Republicans have never been responslble about this issue. It's of huge importance to Americans, and McCain presents himself as an honest person. He must understand how the health care system actually works. He's been through it himself, probably many times.  BTW, Hillary's passion for computerizing medical records is a good thing. She's right, a lot of money could be saved, the system could be made much more efficient, people would get better treatment, and lives would be saved. The sooner we get busy doing this, the better it will be for all of us.
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In todayÂs world of rapid-fire medicine, ÂinvolvedÂ relatives may be a patientÂs most important advocates.
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A hospital apologises to a patient who had to give up his bed in the middle of the night to make way for another emergency.
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For paramedics in rural areas, responding to frantic calls for help is at times akin to doing a high-wire act without a net. Mountains, valleys, bad weather and long distances between hospitals make communication with emergency room physicians spotty at best and nonexistent at worst.
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The national transplant waiting list has grown to more than 87,000 because organ donations from the dead have not kept up with demand. For help, frustrated patients increasingly are turning to the living &#151; even to strangers. That worries bioethicists, surgeons and federal officials who oversee the transplant system, which is designed to treat all patients fairly.
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TAMPA, Fla. - A hospital chain is taping over patients' LiveStrong wristbands because they are yellow - the same color as the "do not resuscitate" bands it puts on patients who do not want to be saved if their heart stops.
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Because of a shortage of beds at Maryland psychiatric hospitals, a growing number of patients, including many who are involuntarily committed, are spending days in emergency rooms, often in violation of a state law that mandates that they be placed at a comprehensive care facility within 30 hours of...