People who are overweight live with this type of ridicule all the time. "There are pervasive stereotypes that obese individuals are lazy and undisciplined," says Rebecca Puhl, director of research at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. They're also commonly viewed as mean, stupid and unhappy. A 2008 study in the International Journal of Obesity found that almost 6% of moderately overweight men and women reported experiencing bias because of their size; the rate was 13% for individuals who were obese and 40% for those who qualified as severely obese.
At Eisenhower Medical Center's new Walter and Leonore Annenberg Pavilion, the beds in the intensive care unit talk — in various languages — alerting patients when it's time for them to change position or warning them not to get out of bed.
“The nurses like the Italian because it's the sexy one,” said Louise White, the hospital's chief nursing officer, showing off one of the computerized beds, which have control panels where a patient's height, weight and other medical data can be input.
“We have a much older population here, so we have more challenges with falling.”
A fourth negotiation session Thursday evening, this one overseen by a federal mediator, failed to resolve a contract dispute between about 100 unionized nurses and administrators at Houlton Regional Hospital.
A fifth meeting has been scheduled for January even though an extension of the existing contract will expire on Dec. 31. The nurses agreed to the extension after their contract expired earlier this fall. Negotiations between the two parties started in November.
“We are pretty disappointed with the results of the meeting today,” Maine State Nurses Association spokeswoman Vanessa Sylvester said Thursday evening. “We will be passing out leaflets in the community this weekend to educate people about the work we do and the safety issues we are facing.”
Registered nurse Cheryl Shelton focuses much of her work these days outside the hospital. After talking with patients before they leave, she visits them in their homes and checks in regularly by phone.
Called a "transition coach," she monitors the patient's medication schedule, offers diet and exercise recommendations, and helps the patient arrange follow-up appointments with physicians - everything it takes to ensure that he or she doesn't need a return trip to the emergency room.
Shelton plays a key role in Barnes-Jewish Hospital's latest of many efforts to tackle the vexing problem of reducing readmissions of Medicare patients. In addition to their reflection on quality of care, readmission rates have taken on a new importance for all hospitals because the federal government, under health care reform, plans to levy financial penalties on those with higher than normal readmission rates.
It’s the rare patient who copes with the stress of cancer by being a comedian, but a few people do. I have always found these patients not only funny, but fascinating.
One patient, a middle-aged woman, very thin, with an elfin face, got bad news on morning rounds. With the medical team at her bedside, she gestured toward the physician, then looked at Todd, her nurse for that shift, and asked in an innocent tone, “Does he know about our baby?”
Todd said he turned every possible shade of red, but it was the kind of comment we’d all come to expect from this sardonic patient. She told us that she wanted her tombstone simply to list all the men with whom she’d ever been intimate. When one particularly somber doctor made his rounds, she scolded him for failing to order her a nightly martini.
Rudy Bermudez was so upset when his fellow members on the Medical Board of California restored the license of a doctor convicted of sexually abusing a patient that when Bermudez was later elected to the state Assembly he penned legislation to revoke the license automatically of every doctor with a sex-crime conviction.
As Illinois policymakers begin crafting better ways to stop sexual misconduct by physicians in this state, Bermudez says they should consider his law, which has permanently stripped the licenses of sex-offending doctors across California.