Friday, August 29, 2014

Two New Tests To Determine The Future Of Patients With Diseased Kidneys

Two New Tests To Determine The Future Of Patients With Diseased Kidneys.
Researchers have come up with two unique tests that seem better able to foresee which patients with long-standing kidney disease are more likely to progress to kidney failure and death. This could help streamline care, getting those patients who necessary it most the care they need, while perhaps sparing other patients unnecessary interventions Brand Club. "The experimental markers provide us with an opportunity to address kidney disease prior to its end of the line stage," said Dr Ernesto P Molmenti, vice chairman of surgery and principal of the transplant program at the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System in Manhasset, NY - "Such primitive treatment could provide for increased survival, as well as enhanced quality of life".

And "The fundamental problem right now is the tests we use currently just are not very good at identifying people's progressing to either more advanced kidney contagion or end-stage kidney disease, so this has big implications in trying to determine who will progress," said Dr Troy Plumb, interim superintendent of nephrology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha capsules. But, he added, "there are current to have to be validated clinical trials" before these changed tests are introduced into clinical practice.

Both studies will appear in the April 20 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, but were released Monday to correspond with presentations at the World Congress of Nephrology, in Vancouver. Some 23 million bourgeoisie in the United States have chronic kidney disease, which can often amplification to kidney failure (making dialysis or a transplant necessary), and even death. But experts have no at bottom good way to predict who will progress to more serious disease or when.

Right now, kidney function, or glomerular filtration rebuke (GFR), is based on measuring blood levels of creatinine, a squander product that is normally removed from the body by the kidneys. The first set of study authors, from the San Francisco VA Medical Center, added two other measurements to the mix: GFR cadenced by cystatin C, a protein also eliminated from the body by the kidneys; and albuminuria, or too much protein in the urine.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Diverting A Nurse In The Preparation Of Medicines Increases The Risk Of Errors

Diverting A Nurse In The Preparation Of Medicines Increases The Risk Of Errors.
Distracting an airline lead during taxi, takeoff or arrival could first to a critical error. Apparently the same is true of nurses who prepare and administer medication to medical centre patients going here. A new study shows that interrupting nurses while they're tending to patients' medication needs increases the chances of error.

As the slew of distractions increases, so do the number of errors and the chance to patient safety medicine. "We found that the more interruptions a nurse received while administering a drug to a indicated patient, the greater the risk of a serious error occurring," said the study's lead author, Johanna I Westbrook, the man of the Health Informatics Research and Evaluation Unit at the University of Sydney in Australia.

For instance, four interruptions in the order of a single drug administration doubled the good chance that the patient would experience a major mishap, according to the study, reported in the April 26 problem of the Archives of Internal Medicine. Experts say the study is the first to show a clear association between interruptions and medication errors.

It "lends material evidence to identifying the contributing factors and circumstances that can leash to a medication error," said Carol Keohane, program director for the Center of Excellence for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "Patients and strain members don't take it that it's dangerous to patient safety to interrupt nurses while they're working," added Linda Flynn, collaborator professor at the University of Maryland School of Nursing in Baltimore. "I have seen my own brood members go out and interrupt the nurse when she's standing at a medication barrow to ask for an extra towel or something else inappropriate".

Julie Kliger, who serves as program director of the Integrated Nurse Leadership Program at the University of California, San Francisco, said that administering medication has become so monotonous that person involved - nurses, health-care workers, patients and families -- has become complacent. "We penury to reframe this in a new light, which is, it's an important, perilous function," Kliger said. "We need to give it the respect that it is due because it is high volume, high peril and, if we don't do it right, there's patient harm and it costs money".