Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Broken Bed Alarm Blamed for UCSD Walkaway Patient's Death

Broken Bed Alarm Blamed for Walkaway Patient's Death
Thomas Vera died after he became disoriented and walked away from his hospital room at UCSD Medical Center in May
By Steven Luke
NBC 7 San Diego
Sep 15, 2014

California Department of Health and Human Services records obtained by NBC 7 shed new light on what went wrong inside UCSD Medical Center when a disoriented patient walked away from his supervised room into a nearby canyon.

The [May 2013] lapse in hospital security led to a tragic search which ended when ...Thomas Vera’s body was found [several] days later less than a mile from the hospital entrance in Palm Canyon.

Family blames the hospital for allowing 58-year-old Thomas Vera, suffering severe head and neck injuries as well as [delusions], to leave the facility...

According to the CHHS investigation, Vera’s bed alarm never sounded. Vera was under video surveillance, and when nurses were notified, the report states they “attempted to contact security by paging security twice with no response and then pushing the panic button twice with no response.”

The panic button was “broken for 8 days,” according to the report.

State inspectors said the hospital failed to routinely test the buttons and failed to repair them when broken.

Prior to Vera’s disappearance, the most recent test had revealed more than 1 out of every 4 panic buttons at UCSD’s two main hospitals didn’t work.

“That’s incomprehensible to me. This is a big time, generally well thought of medical facility, and it’s like clown school” said legal expert Joel Brant, an attorney who specialized in elder care law.

[Maura Larkins comment: I don't believe they're clowns. The buttons were not a priority. UCSD pays huge amounts of money to maintain the equipment it wants to keep maintained. Were the walkaway patients paying full price? Were they a drain on UCSD financially?]

UC San Diego Health Sciences director of communications Jacqueline Carr released this statement in response to the incident:

“UC San Diego Health System underwent extensive internal and external investigations to identify the reasons that led to this tragic event...”

Fifteen months after the incident, CHHS says no fine or penalty has been issued as a result of the mishap...

Read more here.


Missing Hospital Patient's Body Found in Canyon: Officials
By Monica Garske and Dave Summers
NBCSanDiego
Jun 1, 2013

The body of a missing hospital patient was discovered by search and rescue officials in a canyon Friday evening after an extensive search.

Chula Vista resident Thomas Vera, 58, had been missing since Monday. For the last several weeks, he had been a patient at the UCSD Medical Center.

Vera was admitted to the hospital after falling down the stairs at his home. He suffered a concussion and broken collar bone, according to his family, and was awaiting surgery...

A QUESTION OF PRIORITIES: Profits, Short Staffing, and the Shortchanging of Patient Care at UC Medical Centers

The public sees University of California Medical Centers as premier, world-class facilities. We rely upon them when our loved ones face the most serious illnesses because we expect them to provide the highest level of care. With the UC Medical System earning $6.9 billion in operating revenues and hundreds of millions in profits, it has the resources to do just that.

But recently, patient care advocates have witnessed something else: administrative decisions that prioritize UC’s profit margins over patients’ health. These decisions reflect a shift in values that reached a tipping point with a system-wide policy in 2011 that decentralized UC budget practices, and turned each medical center into an independent profit center.

This culture change is evidenced by a sharp rise in management salaries and compensation, excessive management costs, and unprecedented borrowing to construct new buildings.

Since 2009, management at UC Medical Centers has grown by 38 percent, adding $100 million to the annual payroll cost of management.

Debt service payments have almost quadrupled since 2006.

This diversion of patient care dollars results in management’s need to capture “efficiencies” to bolster profit margins.

While “efficiencies” can be positive, they can also have serious negative consequences. Often taking the form of aggressive cost-cutting measures, some translate into chronic short staffing, over scheduling of operating rooms, prioritizing “VIP” patients over everyone else, shortchanging charity care, and outsourcing essential services.

These degrade the medical centers’ core mission...

The State of California provides significant funding for the University’s Health System. In the fiscal year 2012-2013, it will provide approximately $300 million in public dollars for health sciences instruction....[Read more here.]

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Xanax, Valium Raise Alzheimer's Risk: Study

Xanax, Valium Raise Alzheimer's Risk: Study
NewsMaxx
10 Sep 2014

Older adults who habitually use sedatives for anxiety or insomnia may have a heightened risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, a new study suggests.

The drugs in question are benzodiazepines, a widely prescribed group of sedatives that include lorazepam (Ativan), diazepam (Valium) and alprazolam (Xanax). Older adults commonly take the drugs for anxiety or insomnia, often long-term, according to background information in the study.

That's despite the fact that guidelines call for only short-term use of the drugs, at most. In 2012, the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) put benzodiazepines on its list of drugs considered "potentially inappropriate" for seniors, because of risks like confusion, dizziness and falls.

The current study isn't the first to link benzodiazepines to Alzheimer's risk, but it adds to evidence that longer-term use of the drugs -- beyond three months -- might be a risk factor, according to lead researcher Sophie Billioti de Gage, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bordeaux, in France.

"For people needing or using benzodiazepines, it seems crucial to encourage physicians to carefully balance the benefits and risks when renewing the prescription," Billioti de Gage said.

But the study was only able to find an association between the drugs and Alzheimer's risk.

It wasn't designed to definitively prove that the drugs caused the memory-robbing condition, according to geriatrics specialist Dr. Gisele Wolf-Klein, who was not involved in the research.

One reason is that the findings are based on prescription records. "We know the drugs were prescribed, but we don't know how often people took them, or if they took them at all," said Wolf-Klein, director of geriatric education at North Shore-LIJ Health System in New Hyde Park, N.Y.

Regardless, she said, benzodiazepines have enough known risks to warrant concern.

"There is absolutely no doubt these drugs have dangerous side effects," Wolf-Klein said. "It's important for people to understand that they can be addictive, and increase the risk of confusion and falls."

The study was published online Sept. 9 in BMJ.

For the study, Billioti de Gage's team examined the histories of nearly 1,800 older adults with Alzheimer's, comparing each one with four dementia-free people of the same age and sex.

They found that people who'd been prescribed benzodiazepines for more than three months were 51 percent more likely to develop Alzheimer's, versus people who'd never used the drugs.

The risk was almost doubled if they'd taken the medications for more than six months. According to Billioti de Gage, people in the early stages of Alzheimer's can have symptoms like sleep problems and anxiety. That raises the possibility that benzodiazepine use is the result of Alzheimer's, and not the cause of the disease.

But she said her study was designed to counter this possibility. They only considered prescriptions that were started at least five years before a person's Alzheimer's diagnosis.

Billioti de Gage said the medications can be useful short-term. And, she pointed out, the study found no increased Alzheimer's risk among older adults who were prescribed the drugs according to international guidelines; that means using them no longer than one month for insomnia, and no more than three months for anxiety symptoms.

Read more http://www.NewsmaxHealth.com/Health-News/sedatives-alzheimers-xanax-valium/2014/09/10/id/593712/#ixzz3CyTC3GUJ

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Potassium-rich Foods Reduce Risk of Death and Stroke in Older Women, Study Finds

Potassium-rich Foods Reduce Risk of Death and Stroke in Older Women, Study Finds

Sep 05, 2014
Potassium 
..."Previous studies have shown that potassium consumption may lower blood pressure. But whether potassium intake could prevent stroke or death wasn't clear," said Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, the study's senior author and distinguished university professor emerita, department of epidemiology and population health, at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in a press statement...

The study lasted for 11 years and was conducted on 90,137 postmenopausal women, aged between 50 and 79 years... All participants were stroke-free at the start of the study. They also had an average dietary potassium intake of 2,611 mg/day..

At the end of the study, researchers found that women who ate more potassium-rich food were 12 percent less likely to suffer a stroke compared to those that ate lower amounts of potassium. They were also 16 percent less likely to suffer an ischemic stroke and 10 percent less likely to die than those who ate the least amount of potassium-rich food. Among the hypertension-free participants, those that ate more potassium had a 27 percent lower ischemic stroke risk and 21 percent reduced risk for all stroke types.
"Only 2.8 percent of women in our study met or exceeded this level. The World Health Organization's daily potassium recommendation for women is lower, at 3,510 mg or more. Still, only 16.6 percent of women we studied met or exceeded that," said Wassertheil-Smoller. "... Some foods high in potassium include white and sweet potatoes, bananas and white beans."
...
Previous studies have found that potassium-rich food blunts the effects of salt on blood pressure, which reduces the risk of developing kidney stones, and possibly decrease bone loss with age.

The current study was published online in the American Heart Association's journal Stroke. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute funded the study.