[News article] Emergency aid for overdoses — ScienceDaily

Emergency aid for overdoses — ScienceDaily.

From the 17 October 2014 news article

Every minute counts in the event of an overdose. ETH professor Jean-Christophe Leroux and his team have developed an agent to filter out toxins from the body more quickly and efficiently. It can also be used for dialysis in patients suffering from hepatic failure.

To date, antidotes exist for only a very few drugs. When treating overdoses, doctors are often limited to supportive therapy such as induced vomiting. Treatment is especially difficult if there is a combination of drugs involved. So what can be done if a child is playing and accidentally swallows his grandmother’s pills? ETH professor Jean-Christophe Leroux from the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at ETH Zurich wanted to find an answer to this question. “The task was to develop an agent that could eliminate many different toxic substances from the body as quickly as possible,” he says.

Leroux and his team knew that lipid emulsions can bind to drugs when injected into the blood stream. The researchers pursued this approach in their own studies, developing an agent based on liposomes, which are tiny bubbles with a lipid membrane as an outer layer. Instead of an intravenous injection, the agent is used as a dialysis fluid for so-called peritoneal dialysis. This method of dialysis is less common than haemodialysis, which is mainly used as a long-term form of treatment of kidney failure.

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CMS Launches Tools and Initiatives to Help Improve American Health Care Quality

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a new tool for patients and caregivers, and other enhanced initiatives, to empower consumers to make informed choices about their health care, and to help improve the quality of care in America’s hospitals, nursing homes, physician offices, and other health care settings.

From the  5 August 2011 press release

“These tools are new ways CMS is making sure consumers have information about health care quality and important information they need to make the best decisions about where to receive high-quality care,” said Dr. Don Berwick, the CMS Administrator.  “These efforts are designed to also encourage providers to deliver safe, patient-centered care that consumers can rely on and will motivate improvement across our health care system.”

The steps announced today include:

·       A Quality Care Finder to provide consumers with one online destination to access all of Medicare’s Compare tools — comparison information on hospitals, nursing homes and plans: www.Medicare.gov/QualityCareFinder.

·       An updated Hospital Compare website, which now includes data about how well hospitals protect outpatients from surgical infections and whether hospitals care for outpatients who are treated for  suspected heart attacks with proven therapies that reduce death: www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov

Read the entire press release 

Related articles

• CMS Updates Medicare.gov Portal With Added Searches and Comparison Information (ducknetweb.blogspot.com)
• U.S. health care system fails to deliver – Same Story The World Over… (earlsview.com)

Infections in ICUs Plummeting, Too Many Remain in Hospitals and Dialysis Clinics

Infections in ICUs Plummeting, Too Many Remain in Hospitals and Dialysis Clinics

http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2011/p0301_vitalsigns.html

ICUs show that preventing infections is possible; other health care settings must adopt prevention practices

From the press release

The number of bloodstream infections in intensive care unit patients with central lines decreased by 58 percent in 2009 compared to 2001, according to a new CDC Vital Signs report. During these nine years, the decrease represented up to 27,000 lives saved and $1.8 billion in excess health care costs. Bloodstream infections in patients with central lines can be deadly, killing as many as 1 in 4 patients who gets one….

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“Preventing bloodstream infections is not only possible, it should be expected. Meticulous insertion and care of the central line by all members of the clinical care team including doctors, nurses and others at the bedside is essential. The next step is to apply what we’ve learned from this to other health care settings and other health care-associated conditions, so that all patients are protected,” said Thomas R. Frieden, M.D., M.P.H., CDC director.

In addition to the ICU findings, the report found that about 60,000 bloodstream infections in patients with central lines occurred in non-ICU health care settings such as hospital wards and kidney dialysis clinics. About 23,000 of these occurred in non-ICU patients (2009) and about 37,000 infections occurred in dialysis clinics patients (2008).

“This reduction is the result of hospital, local, state and national medical and public health efforts focused on tracking infection rates and then using that information to tailor and evaluate prevention programs,” said Denise Cardo, M.D., director of CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion. “The report findings point to a clear need for action beyond ICUs. Fortunately, we have a prevention model focused on full collaboration that can be applied broadly to maximize prevention efforts.”

Infections are one of the leading causes of hospitalization and death for hemodialysis patients. At any given time, about 350,000 people are receiving hemodialysis treatment for kidney failure. Seven in 10 patients who receive dialysis begin that treatment through a central line….

Related Articles

• Patient Safety Awareness Week 3: Positive News on Infections, More Work Needed (hcfama.org)
• Rates of Pneumonia Dramatically Reduced in Patients on Ventilators in Michigan Intensive Care Units (nlm.nih.gov)
• Challenges In Stemming The Spread Of Resistant Bacteria In Intensive Care
• Simple Cotton Swab Slashes Reduce Post-Op Infection (Medical News today, June 2011)
• Infection Risk Lurks in Hospital ICUs (webmd.com)