Back from the wilds of Virginia, where he hunts black bears with a bow and arrow and squirrels with a shotgun, John Hawkins was sitting in the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, shaking in his work boots. The man who spent the past two decades in a log cabin was about to see a doctor the first time in 21 years. "I hate this," he said Wednesday afternoon, squirming in his chair. "I gotta get back to the mountains." But Hawkins fought the urge to flee, waiting nervously for his number to be called. The large-scale free clinic, the first of its kind in the District, was his best shot at free medical care. Although he lives only three hours outside Washington, he hadn't been inside the Capital Beltway for more than 20 years. A part-time carpenter, Hawkins doesn't have health insurance, like the other nearly 2,000 patients who converged on the convention center Wednesday. By 2 p.m., more than 700 people had been treated, and lines grew longer. The treatment was underwritten by 44,000 donors who contributed $300,000.
After nearly three years of work, the University of Minnesota on Wednesday released new rules governing potential conflicts of interest between personnel in its medical school and business interests, including drug and medical device companies. The ethics policy overhaul is part of a university-wide effort, but officials at the U say the new rules are far tougher for faculty and staff at the Academic Health Center, which includes the schools of Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing and colleges of Pharmacy and Veterinary Medicine. The policy for the health center took effect on Wednesday. "The feeling was that the bar needed to be higher for people who come in clinical contact with patients and others," said Frank Cerra, MD, the U's senior vice president for health sciences. "I think it's a good policy."
Phoenix Children's Hospital and the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix have reached a pact that would share resources to fund medical education, pediatric care and research. The Arizona Board of Regents Thursday is expected to vote on the alliance that would establish a new academic pediatric department affiliated with the medical school but located at Phoenix Children's Hospital, according to a Board of Regents' document. The pact calls for the hospital to provide some revenue to the medical school. In turn, the university would provide money through the state's Medicaid program to support the hospital's graduate medical education efforts. Phoenix Children's Hospital representatives say the pact, approved by the hospital's board last week, benefits both the hospital and medical school.
Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota is planning to build a top-level pediatric trauma center, with the help of a $17.5 million gift from UnitedHealth Group Inc. It is by far the largest grant the hospital has ever received and is part of a $150 million fundraising drive by Children's for its new building and accompanying programs. The $17.5 million grant is also UnitedHealth's largest single gift so far under its United Minnesota program, which aims to hand out $100 million over 10 years. Children's expansion comes at a time when competition for kids' health care is intensifying. Fairview is building a new $275 million children's hospital, the University of Minnesota Amplatz Children's Hospital, set to open in March. Meanwhile, two other Minnesota facilities recently received Level 1 pediatric trauma certification, the same level that Children's will seek.
Attorneys for nurse Jean Law and her husband said mistakes in an emergency room examination at Baptist Medical Center South in Jacksonville, FL, caused doctors to send the 40-year-old wife and mother home with a pain prescription while a bacterial infection was overwhelming her body and making her blood septic. That error, they said, cost Law precious hours when antibiotics could have been used to control an infection that eventually caused flesh in her extremities to turn black and die. Law’s legs were later amputated below the knee and eight fingers were cut off to stop the spread of sepsis. A part of her nose was also lost. A complaint was filed with Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, the lawyers said. They said a malpractice lawsuit will be filed once a required 90-day notice period expires. “When she depended on them for her life, they failed her,” lawyer Thomas Edwards said. “This is a case that should never have happened.” A Baptist spokeswoman said hospital staff weren’t to blame.
Will Alzheimer’s disease, a terrible degenerative brain disease with no treatments and no clear guidelines for diagnosis before its end stages, become like heart disease? That might mean early markers of risk, analogous to high cholesterol levels, that predict who is likely to get it. And it might mean drugs that actually prevent it. That is the hope behind new diagnostic guidelines being proposed by the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer’s Association. In July, when the groups first announced their proposed guidelines, they were met with some skepticism and anger. Why suggest ways of diagnosing the disease before a person even has symptoms? Why tell people they are doomed? And are those early diagnosis guidelines just a sop to pharmaceutical companies so they can start marketing expensive, and perhaps not very effective, new drugs?