Dr. William Schaffner is a leader of Joint Commission Resources' Flu Vaccination Challenge, which has signed up more than 1,100 health care organizations this year.
The World Health Organization announced Nov. 6 that it will launch a worldwide campaign on that day -- April 7, 2011 -- to safeguard medicines for future generations.
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Oct. 28 called the condition "the military health issue of our era."
Many U.S. health care providers already require employees to accept vaccinations. Henry Ford Health System requires measles, mumps, rubella, and tuberculosis vaccinations, with no opt-outs allowed.
Why is manual patient handling unsafe? The cumulative weight a nurse or nursing assistant may have to lift during patient lifts or transfers within an eight-hour shift can be as much as 1.8 tons.
John Duncan, director of the California Department of Industrial Relations, says a meeting with OSHA's regional administrator could start a national dialogue to clarify what "at least as effective" means.
At the request of the Food and Drug Administration, U.S. marshals seized articles of prescription and over-the-counter drug products from Tri-Med Laboratories Inc. in Somerset, N.J. earlier this month. The seizure warrant, issued by the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey and unsealed this week, shows the drugs are unapproved and adulterated new drugs.
According to University of Maryland School of Nursing researchers, nurses in hospitals and other health care facilities may perform better by following the lead of airlines, trucking, and nuclear plants by limiting hours of service, ensuring prompt and definite breaks during shifts, and other scheduling strategies.
Research published in the November issue of Anesthesiology describes development of a new Risk Stratification Index (RSI) that allows important clinical outcomes such as length-of-stay and mortality for surgical patients to be accurately compared among hospitals using only publicly available billing data. The new risk stratification system is more accurate than existing outcomes measurements such as the Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI) and the investigators have made it freely available.
Diabetes was the seventh leading cause of death in 2007, and is the leading cause of new cases of blindness among adults under age 75, kidney failure, and non-accident/injury leg and foot amputations among adults.
An occupational health concern common among all Deepwater Horizon response workers was heat stress from work in a hot and humid environment.
A new independent study by HealthGrades of patient outcomes at America's hospitals found that patients at 5-star rated hospitals had a 72 percent lower risk of dying when compared with patients at 1-star-rated hospitals--a gap that has held steady over the past years even as overall mortality rates have improved.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) recently announced the award of 23 grants totaling approximately $40 million over five years to community service organizations across the country that deliver behavioral health services to help people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness because of mental health and substance abuse issues.
According to new recommendations by the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology website, anyone with a history of suspected egg allergy should first be evaluated by an allergist or immunologist for appropriate testing and diagnosis but can probably receive the vaccination.
Socioeconomic factors such as a lower level of education and lack of health insurance may impact individuals' knowledge of the type of skin cancer with which they are diagnosed, according to an investigator at The Cancer Institute of New Jersey.
A research team from the Jefferson Sleep Disorders Center at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital has utilized a simple, eight-item, pre-operative questionnaire about obstructive sleep apnea syndrome that could help identify patients at risk for complications following surgery, according to a report in the October issue of Archives of Otolaryngology - Head & Neck Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Authors of a paper in The Lancet estimated a range of 125,000 to 277,000 annual deaths in India, the most populous country where malaria is common, although WHO estimates only 15,000 per year there.
A state board approved a $72.3 million contract Wednesday to add Agusta Aerospace Corp. AW139s to the fleet operated by the Maryland State Police.
Keynote speakers include Bill Gates, Ted Turner, NIH Director Francis Collins, and Dr. Julio Frenk, faculty dean of the Harvard School of Public Health.
When they do not have to pay a health insurance deductible, people are more likely to undergo screening for conditions like cancer and high cholesterol. However, the increase is modest, and in high-deductible plans, it is quite small, according to a new study in the journal Health Services Research.