Since its early beginnings in Europe, during the polio epidemics of the 1950s, intensive care medicine has grown to become a specialty in its own right and the intensive care unit (ICU) occupies an increasingly important position in every hospital. Intensive care doctors are responsible for the management of very sick patients often with multiple and complex disease processes, and ICUs are now…
The theatre is spectacular. Its immaculate cornflower blue glass walls surround space age technology — the EndoALPHA system. Even that name suggests something that surpasses what existed before; it's `the be all and end all´.
When the Oxford Radclife Hospitals NHS Trust invested £109 million in its new Oxford Children's Hospital, funding for certain special embellishments could not be contemplated. Thus a £15 million Campaign was launched to enable the hospital to be built and equipped far beyond the NHS standard. £13.8 million of that target has so far been received. Who raised that astonishing sum? Its…
UK, France & the Ukraine — In the spring of 2006, Kateryna Yuschenko, Head of the Supervisory Board for the Ukraine 3000 International Charitable Foundation, and wife of the president of Ukraine, laid a capsule at the site of a future hospital — The All-Ukrainian Mother and Child Healthcare Centre.
In the heart of Paris, the Necker children's hospital, the oldest in the world dedicated to paediatrics, was suffocating inside a completely inward-looking enclave. The challenge was to achieve a vast upheaval to overcome the hospital's lack of relationship with its surroundings and open it onto the city, while also carrying out an in-depth metamorphosis to adapt it to new requirements.
A highly innovative scheme to use mobile technology to obtain a patients weight has proved success in Hammersmith & Fulham PCT. The recent scheme found that by using iPLATO Patient Care Messaging to request a patient's weight via text message, the patient's medical record could be updated quickly and efficiently with a current body mass index (BMI) reading.
As announced today, MEDRAD, an affiliate of Bayer HealthCare and a leading provider of contrast injection systems used to diagnose cardiovascular disease, has entered into a definitive merger agreement with Possis Medical, leading provider of mechanical thrombectomy devices used to treat narrowed or blocked blood vessels. MEDRAD will acquire Possis Medical in a cash tender offer for US-Dollar…
According to a study published by Cancer Research UK scientists the survival rates of bladder cancer patients treated with radiotherapy are the same as those of patients undergoing radical cystectomy. The researchers investigated the medical records of 169 patients with invasive bladder cancer that were treated in Leeds between 1996 and 2000.
A new plaster combines an innovative warming system with the two potent anaesthetics lidocaine and tetracaine. The warming of the skin increases vasodilatation and the blood vessel permeability, which accelerates the drug administration. EUSA Pharma's new product eliminates pain in 95% of patients after 30 minutes, providing a fast and effective surface anaesthesia of the skin.
According to a study that was recently published on bmj.com, researchers found evidence that a significant number of patients treated with low doses of aspirin for its antiplatelet effect are actually aspirin resistant. Such a resistance makes patients four times more likely to suffer a life-threatening stroke or heart attack.
For women with breast symptoms such as lumps, the ability of diagnostic mammograms to detect breast cancer accurately depends strongly on which radiologist reads them, according to a Group Health study published online Dec. 11 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
The second successful hemicorporectomy has been done several months ago by Frantisek Antos and his surgical team from Faculty hospital Bulovka.
seca GmbH has launched its newly designed website. Customers can new select a country to gain information in their own language (wherever possible), and then view three product categories - medical, specialist and private, each containing information already available in seca's printed catalogue. Downloadable user manuals and product specifications are also available.
Komet Medical presented its range of high-quality Evolution sawblades.
Non-invasive ventilation (NIV) is often chosen in cases of acute respiratory insufficiency, because modern respirators offer response times of milliseconds, so technical hurdles are overcome.
Hill-Rom's TotalCare adjustable electric hospital air beds were designed for the ease of use in intensive care units by providing special features that allow unrestrained access to tend patients.
Currently used in pilot projects in the UK and the Netherlands, the new CareServant system from Philips, is an interactive multimedia system for use by hospital patients as well as staff.
Berchtold's inviting booth at Medica displayed its full range of equipment for operating theatres, and the company's special Supersuite concept also attracted considerable interest.
Engineer Stefan Wollschläger, a partner in Visality Consulting GmbH, Berlin, and Dr Gregor Zehle MBA, a senior consultant at GÖK Consulting AG, Berlin, discuss the benefits of a strategy transfer from the aviation sector to operating theatre management. Russian article
According to a recently published study in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research, a vertebral fracture assessment (VFA) examination can be used to measure abdominal aortic calcification (AAC). The level of AAC can predict the likelihood of myocardial infarction as well as stroke among elderly women, independent of other clinical risk factors.
A research carried out at six hospitals in the West Midlands, UK, is evaluating the use of pulse oximetry as a screening tool for congenital heart disease in newborn babies. Approximately three percent of infant deaths are caused by these significant heart defects and at the moment only less than half of the affected babies are identified by clinical examination, the current screening technique.
Following the proposal of the European Union to all member states, Finland established a national screening programme for colorectal cancer in 2004. The programme is the first of its kind, aiming to screen a target group of women and men between the ages of 60 and 69 by the use of faecal occult blood test (FOBT).
According to a survey published in the journal Clinical Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians, there seems to be a serious under provision of out-of-hours emergency endoscopy services for patients with gastrointestinal bleeding in the UK. The electronic survery was carried out by the British Society of Gastroenterology, which sent two questionnaires to the endoscopy leads of 188 acute NHS…
Minimally invasive endoscopic stent procedures can reduce the hospital stay of patients suffering from colorectal cancer. Stenting may also reduce the future risk of surgery, reports colorectal surgeon Eric M. Haas MD, of Colorectal Surgery Associates in Houston, USA.
Heinrich Dräger's concept for the first Pulmotor was ahead of its time, for he was the first to choose a mechanical principle that could closely copy human physiology.
