The digital notation devices communicate wirelessly with hospital records through a BlackBerry smartphone.  This enables the nurses and midwives to store patient information remotely and securely, transferring data almost instantly.

The Portsmouth NHS Trust believes its PaperIQ digi-pens save time and money by cutting the amount of data entry in half.

The pens work by digitally reading and recording the nurses’ handwriting. Their notes are transmitted through Bluetooth to a BlackBerry smartphone and are forwarded automatically to the patient records system.

Richard Sargent, ICT specialist at Portsmouth Hospital Trust said: “The traditional consultation process for the Trust was very paper intensive and required midwives and nurses to record their activities on paper forms when they visited patients’ homes.

“They then had to type up the same details back at the office as the maternity records booklet stays with the mother throughout the term of her pregnancy and post natal care period.”

The clever pens also act as a safety device for lone nurses working in risky situations. By striking a code at the top of their notepads the pens switch to an audio record mode, allowing police to monitor their conversations.

Mr Sargent said the pens have saved the time of five full time midwives and – after a year’s usage – have already paid for themselves.

He added: “We are eliminating the double entry of information as digital notes are taken at the episode of care with the mother and then immediately and securely transferred to the patient record system.”

Currently 130 midwives, across four hospitals, are using the digi-pens. The Trust is looking to roll them out to other departments, starting with a trial at the Queen Alexandra accident and emergency department in Portsmouth.

For more information, check out E-Health Insider

-via Yahoo News

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Millions of people around the world have experienced the revolution in home fitness since last spring with EA SPORTS Active™, the number one rated fitness program for the Wii™**. Today, EA SPORTS™, a label of Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS), announced that EA SPORTS Active 2.0* (working title) is now in development and will be available this fall on PlayStation®3, Wii™, iPhone® and iPod touch®. The new EA SPORTS Active 2.0* fitness program will deliver true fitness results by featuring an innovative wireless control system, powered by new leg and arm straps with motion sensors, a heart rate monitor to capture intensity, and a new online hub to track and share workout data. EA SPORTS Active 2.0* will make working out simple, effective and will go with you wherever you are.

“The launch of EA SPORTS Active 2.0* will define a new era of interactive fitness with the use of innovative motion sensor peripherals and a heart rate monitor that provide users with a fitness experience delivering real, measurable results,” said Tarrnie Williams, Executive Producer, EA SPORTS Active. “As the number one rated fitness program for the Wii**, EA SPORTS Active proved itself as the industry leader and provided the foundation for our fitness franchise. The success stories we’ve received from our users show that EA SPORTS Active is changing lives and we’re so proud to be part of it.”

The new EA SPORTS Active 2.0* innovative wireless control system will give users complete freedom of motion, making it even easier to get a workout that delivers great results. Using innovative heart rate detection technology, the heart rate monitor will help users monitor intensity, providing constant on-screen monitoring throughout the workout and tracking user data over time to optimize performance. The EA SPORTS Active 2.0* online hub will allow users to track and share all of their workout data, providing a centralized destination for all fitness, wellness and training needs. It will host a thriving online global community of EA SPORTS Active users who can share their fitness journeys, interact with workout groups and send messages to each other online to stay inspired and engaged. Users will also have the ability to download new workouts and exercises to their online connected PlayStation3 console to keep their workouts fresh and maintain motivation***.

EA SPORTS Active 2.0* provides total body conditioning using progressive exercise in new prescribed programs. A three-phase, nine-week program provides a fitness roadmap to help keep users motivated and on track of their fitness goals. Additional mini-programs will also be available to add on, keeping workouts fresh and inspiring. The EA SPORTS Active personal trainer will walk users through their workout and provide continued encouragement with feedback to ensure an optimal workout experience.

EA SPORTS Active 2.0* is in development at EA Canada in Vancouver. It has not yet been rated by the ESRB or PEGI; visitwww.esrb.org and www.pegi.info for updated rating information. For more information please visit www.easportsactive.com.

* Working Title

** According to Metacritic.com, March 9th, 2010

*** Internet connection and EA account required

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In the study of children who had suffered cardiac arrest outside a hospital, those who received any CPR were about three times more likely to survive than those who did not get CPR.

Still, Dr. Taku Iwami of Kyoto University Health Service and colleagues found, for most children who suffer cardiac arrest, conventional CPR with rescue breathing is best – and overall, the rates of survival are still quite low, fewer than one in ten.

“The main message” from the new study, which appears in The Lancet, is that “doing something is better than doing nothing. Ideally providing compressions and rescue breathing would be best,” Dr. Michael Sayre, who was not involved in the study, told Reuters Health.

Sayre, of the Ohio State University in Columbus, is chair of the Emergency Cardiovascular Care Committee for the American Heart Association (AHA).

Cardiac arrest occurs when the heart develops a rhythm disturbance that causes it to stop beating. Without prompt medical attention, cardiac arrest is fatal within minutes. CPR can help keep the victim’s blood flowing until emergency help arrives, boosting the chances of survival.

In 2008, the AHA issued updated CPR recommendations, which state that in most cases involving an adult who suffers sudden cardiac arrest, bystanders can skip mouth-to-mouth breathing and perform compression-only CPR.

Research showing that chest compressions alone are as effective, if not more so, than standard CPR in sustaining cardiac-arrest victims until emergency help arrives prompted the update. And the hope was that more people would perform CPR, when needed, if they didn’t have to do mouth-to-mouth. Hands-only CPR is also easier to teach, learn and remember than conventional CPR.

But data are lacking in children. Therefore, Iwami’s group studied 5,170 children aged 17 or younger who suffered cardiac arrest outside of a hospital. About half of the children — 47 percent — received CPR from a bystander. This confirms, Sayre said, that in Japan as in the US, “all too often no CPR is done for children or for adults.”

Of the children who did get bystander-initiated CPR, 1,551 children (30 percent) received conventional CPR and 888 (17 percent) received compression-only CPR.

Overall, children lucky enough to get any type of CPR from a passerby had nearly a threefold higher rate of a “favorable neurological outcome” – meaning little or no brain damage — than those not given CPR (4.5 percent versus 1.9 percent).

Although the success rate varied depending on whether cardiac arrest was due to a heart-related problem or another issue such as drowning, most of the cases were due to problems unrelated to the heart.

“This paper confirms that performing any form of CPR doubles or even triples the victim’s chances of survival regardless of their age,” Sayre told Reuters Health.

Nonetheless, overall, only 9 percent of children survived out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and only 3 percent had little or no brain damage.

All in all, Sayre said, this new study is “very supportive” of the current AHA recommendations. “If you see someone suddenly collapse you need to do two things — call 911 and start pushing hard and fast in the center of the victim’s chest and if they are a child it would be great if you could also do some rescue breathing,” advised Sayre.

SOURCE: The Lancet

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Sophie Konderak, 16, suffered from sudden cardiac arrest during a training session at a leisure center.  The lifeguard dragged her from the water, unconscious, and immediately began cardiopulmonary resuscitation.  She was doing both chest compressions and rescue breathing.  She had never before tried to revive someone, and when Sophie started breathing, she had believed the effort to be successful.

But she didn’t check for the all important pulse.

When paramedics arrived four minutes later, they resumed CPR, which was surprising to the lifeguards who were heard asking “Why are you doing CPR?  She’s alive.”  The child’s mother, distraught at the circumstances as any of us would be, broke down and cried out “It’s my child’s life, why didn’t anybody do anything?  How could you just leave her lying there? She would have survived.”

Young Sophie was pronounced dead shortly after at the city’s “Royal Infirmary.”  The initial cardiac arrest was due to an undiagnosed heart condition.

Dr. Christopher Duke, a heart expert,  said Sophie “would have survived” had she received continuous CPR, adding “You don’t stop resuscitation just because a patient appears to be breathing. You only stop if there’s breathing and a pulse.”

Coroner Catherine Mason said she would write to the Resuscitation Council of the UK, which provides guidelines for life-saving techniques, to ask it to amend its training guidelines to include checking for a pulse. “The crucial point of this is that the CPR was stopped.  The guidelines should be changed so that from when CPR commences it is conducted until a medically qualified person arrives or the patient regains consciousness.”

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“Since most people carry cell phones, we designed a cell phone program that can walk people through how to perform CPR,” said lead author Raina Merchant, MD, of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, Pa. “It is well-documented that bystanders are reluctant to perform CPR because of a lack of confidence about technique, despite the fact that bystander CPR can deliver blood to vital organs until an ambulance arrives. This has the potential to become a critical, life-saving tool.”

Researchers developed a simple audio recording that can be used by both basic cell phones and the latest, most high-tech smart phones. They evaluated the quality of CPR performed by people who are both trained and untrained in CPR. Regardless of training history, participants using the audio recording on their phone performed significantly better CPR on a manikin compared with participants without the phone.

Participants instructed by cell phone performed 100 compressions per minute, versus 44 per minute in the control group, and achieved compression depth of 41 millimeters, versus 31 millimeters in the control group (depth of compressions less than 38 millimeters is considered too shallow). Ninety-seven percent of the cell phone group demonstrated correct hand placement, versus 75 percent of the control group, and 73 percent of the cell phone group reported feeling excellent or very good about their ability to perform CPR, versus 34 percent of the control group.

“This is an exciting first step for potentially increasing bystanders’ access to real-time CPR instructions that can be used in an emergency to help those in need,” said Dr. Merchant. “These findings show that even without training, anyone can save a life with the push of a button on their cell phone.”

Annals of Emergency Medicine is the peer-reviewed scientific journal for the American College of Emergency Physicians, a national medical society. ACEP is committed to advancing emergency care through continuing education, research, and public education. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, ACEP has 53 chapters representing each state, as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. A Government Services Chapter represents emergency physicians employed by military branches and other government agencies.

SOURCE American College of Emergency Physicians

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ProCPR on Facebook – We’ve got a growing community on Facebook that is already a few hundred strong. Join the community and communicate directly with us there!

ProCPR on YouTube – Subscribe to our youtube channel, and you’ll be updated when you log in to youtube, whenever we add some new videos. Recently we’ve added some snow safety videos to the mix, which have proven to be pretty successful with the harsh winter that has hit every state in the U.S.

Company Twitter Accounts:
@ProTrainings – Overall account that includes system wide updates, including new program announcements.

ProTrainings also has two lists: Network List, which includes all of the various twitter accounts listed below, and People List, which includes all of the people in the company that are on twitter.

@ProCPR – Any time we update the blog, this is updated.  We also respond to some inquiries, from time to time.  Feel free to mention us in your tweets!  We’ll try to get back to you in a timely manner.  We hope to hear from you soon!

@ProFirstAid – Any time that we add new videos and make some great new additions to ProFirstAid, we’ll update this account.  Our first aid training is second to none, we stand by it with confidence.  Any update we make improves the program, so keep up with us!

@ProBloodborne – We do the same thing here.  Yup.  Don’t want to repeat myself.  But in this case, it has to do with Bloodborne Pathogens program updates.  So, have you been watching the Winter Olympics?

@ProHomeSafety – This one, when we’re ready, will be updated pretty regularly with new home safety videos.  We just haven’t had the time to commit to making it into the project we all want it to be.  But we do have a nifty logo!

@RNstories – Here’s the newest member of our family.  All of you!  Well, the registered nurse variety.  This is the feed of the stories that are posted at RNstories.com, which we feel has great potential.  So get posting stories, and a great community will build around it!

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They are mistakes that cost lives, says study researcher Ramanan Laxminarayan, PhD, MPH, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C. think tank Resources for the Future.

“It is a staggering number and one that does not have to be,” Laxminarayan tells WebMD. “When a patient goes to the hospital for another illness and dies of pneumonia, it does not always occur to the family that it was a mistake. But if that same patient went to the hospital and got blood tainted with HIV, the response would be quite different.”

Hospital acquired infections actually kill three times more Americans than HIV does. Yet we’re only beginning to get a handle on the size of the problem. That’s because it’s been very hard to separate out the costs — in terms of lives, suffering, and money — from the suffering caused by the illnesses and injuries that land people in the hospital in the first place.

Laxminarayan and colleagues analyzed administrative data from a huge national database of information on hospital records for 69 million U.S. residents in 40 states between 1998 and 2006. They focused only on infections acquired in the hospital, and not on infections picked up in the community.

Most of the infections come from using catheters and ventilators. Some of the germs causing the infections have been around for years; others are scary new bugs such as the MRSA staph “superbug.”

Johns Hopkins researcher Peter J. Pronovost, MD, PhD, is a world expert on hospital-acquired infections. He tells WebMD that the Laxminarayan study finally gives hard numbers to a problem that has vexed hospitals for decades.

“These deaths are invisible. The public doesn’t know. They are happening one at a time, silently, and patients think they are inevitable,” Pronovost tells WebMD. “But we know from our large patient studies this is not the case.”

In a study reported earlier this month, Pronovost and colleagues showed that by instituting simple safety checklists for hospital procedures — and by insisting on a team approach that includes the lowliest nurse assistants and the loftiest senior surgeons — hospital infection rates can be dropped nearly to zero.

But it’s not all up to hospital staff. You and your family can do a lot to prevent deadly hospital infections. Pronovost offers the following list. Note that some of these items may help you decide which hospital you should go to in the first place:

• Ask your doctor the hospital’s rate of bloodstream infections; it should be at or below one infection per 1,000 catheter days.
• Ask if the hospital is participating in the national effort to prevent these infections – it should be.
• Ask if they use the Pronovost checklist when inserting central line catheters.
• Ask if the clinicians wash their hands each time they enter your room.
• If you have a catheter, ask daily if you still need it. The catheter is a risk for infections

Pronovost says that while hospitals may have good intentions, it’s essential they keep track of their hospital infection rate. If a hospital can’t tell you its infection rate, it’s not doing enough.

-via WebMD

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Here’s how it works, a simply as possible.  You use our website, either ProCPR.org or ProFirstAid.com, to get your CPR certification.  But if you need the hands-on training in addition, visit BlendedCPR.com and find a skill evaluator near you.  If you can’t find one, call us, and we’ll assist you in locating someone that can help you out!

It is that simple.  If you’d like to know more, we have videos to help explain it to you, more in-depth.  We also have group programs available if you need more for your company.  We’ll work with you every step of the way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DTVeUbMn90

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While not intended to replace regular medical care, these modules can help patients and at risk individuals, family and friends communicate better with their health care provider.

Heart failure is very prominent in society as nearly five million Americans live with this condition and as many as 700,000 new cases are diagnosed each year.

“Common signs of heart failure are often misdiagnosed and misunderstood,” said Dr. Douglas Mann, HFSA President and Chief of Cardiology, Washington University School of Medicine. “It is the goal of HFSA to educate people about the common signs and symptoms of heart failure. National Heart Failure Awareness Week is a chance to highlight the facts, resources and opportunities that can help physicians, nurses, patients and their families, and at risk individuals better understand heart failure. Heart failure can be prevented and with proper care and diagnosis, can be effectively treated to allow many patients to live.”

About Heart Failure

Heart failure is a progressive condition in which the heart muscle becomes abnormal after damage from heart attack or high blood pressure and gradually loses its ability to pump enough blood to supply the body’s needs. Many people are not aware they have heart failure because the symptoms are often mistaken for signs of getting older. Heart failure affects from 4.6 to 4.8 million individuals in the United States. Demographic and clinical evidence strongly suggest the prevalence of heart failure will increase throughout the next decade. Ten to 15 years ago heart failure was considered a “death sentence;” however, recent advances in treatment have shown that early diagnosis and proper care in early stages of the condition are key to slowing, stopping or in some cases reversing progression, improving quality of life, and extending life expectancy. For more information on heart failure, please visit www.abouthf.org.

About the Heart Failure Society of America

The Heart Failure Society of America (HFSA) is a nonprofit educational organization, founded in 1994 as the first organized society of heart failure experts in the Americas. Today HFSA has over 1,700 members and provides a forum for all those interested in heart function, heart failure research and patient care. The Society also serves as a resource for governmental agencies (FDA, NIH, NHLBI, CMS), private industry and health care providers. Additional information on HFSA and Heart Failure Awareness Week can be found at www.hfsa.org.

To bring attention to this growing heath problem in the United States the US Senate passed a Resolution in 2000 declaring the week of Valentine’s Day as National Heart Failure Awareness Week.

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RN Stories is a place where you can share stories from work.  Things that touched your heart, funny stories, and perhaps what got you into nursing in the first place.

We’re very excited for the RN community to get involved and have fun with it.  We’re really curious to see how inspirational the site becomes to people in the nursing field.

To use it, all you need is a facebook account, as it uses Facebook Connect alone to sign in and start writing.

Visit RN Stories

Follow RN Stories on Twitter

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