Although specific infection rates are not publicly reported in North Carolina, many Triangle health system hospitals say they have seen serious infections fall by at least half in recent years. The improvement has come from low-tech solutions such as improving hand washing before and after contact with patients, and from following proven infection control practices more consistently. The hospitals took a fresh look at infection control after the national Institute of Medicine published the landmark 1999 report, which found that up to 98,000 patients die each year because of preventable medical errors--including preventable infections.
Florida's Lake Nona "medical city" project is finally breaking groung as construction begins on the University of Central Florida's College of Medicine and its Burnett College of Biomedical Sciences, as well as the Burnham Institute for Medical Research. All three facilities are scheduled to open in the latter half of 2009. UCF hopes to eventually add a school of nursing at the site in southeastern Orlando, though that would be years down the road. Also planned is a cancer-research institute that will likely be run jointly by M.D. Anderson Cancer Center Orlando and UCF, and a long-awaited VA hospital, but construction on the latter facility won't begin until 2009 at the earliest, with an expected opening date of 2012.
The doctor-patient relationship is a social dance that, at its core, is driven by a sick person feeling dependent, vulnerable and wanting to be liked by the doctor. The more worried a patient is about his or her health, the more exaggerated the dance--often to the detriment of the patient's health. Yet, doctors also need to be liked, so how do you find a common ground?
Florida doctors are asking the state to sharply hike the amount they can charge patients for copies of their medical records, saying their costs are rising faster than their incomes. The request that has brought protests from consumer advocates and malpractice lawyers.
A Minnesota magazine's popular Top Doctors issue has hit the newsstands.For 17 years, the magazine has had a virtual monopoly on rating doctors in Minnesota, and the issue is a top seller every year, despite some skepticism about the survey's methodology.
Some severely injured patients with few options for treatment in America are searching the Internet for experimental treatments--and often land on websites promoting stem cell treatments in China. Western doctors warn that patients are serving as guinea pigs in a country that isn't doing the rigorous lab and human tests that are needed to prove a treatment is safe and effective.