Top 5 Skills Every Nurse Should Develop Quickly

Top 5 Skills Every Nurse Should Develop Quickly

What are the top five skills that every nurse should develop? Nope! Not those. I imagine many of you reading automatically think about the clinical skills it takes to become a professional nurse. While clinical skills are... read more

Communicating Context in Quality Improvement Reports

Communicating Context in Quality Improvement Reports

The study by Demb and colleagues reports on the positive results of an intervention strategy to reduce excess radiation exposure across 5 academic medical centers associated with the University of California. Leading up to... read more

Pricey Technology Is Keeping People Alive Who Don’t Want to Live

Pricey Technology Is Keeping People Alive Who Don’t Want to Live

As an ICU physician, I’ve used technologies like breathing machines and feeding tubes to save lives that would have been lost just a few decades earlier. But I’ve also seen the substantial costs, both human and financial,... read more

Family Responses to Prognostic Information in Chronic Critical Illness

Family Responses to Prognostic Information in Chronic Critical Illness

Prognostic disclosure by skilled clinician communicators evokes a repertoire of responses from surrogates for the chronically critically ill. Recognition of these response patterns may help all clinicians better communicate... read more

Defining the Role of Specialists in Value-Based Health Care

Defining the Role of Specialists in Value-Based Health Care

Health care is at a crossroads and under pressure to add value by improving patient experience and health outcomes and reducing costs to the system. Efforts to improve the care model in primary care, such as the patient-centered... read more

Learning to talk about death should start early in doctors' careers

Learning to talk about death should start early in doctors' careers

At first glance, physicians’ poor understanding of death and the process of dying is baffling, since they are supposed to be custodians of health across the lifespan. Look deeper, though, and it may reflect less the attitudes... read more

Visual Abstracts, A New Strategy for Creating Journal Articles

Visual Abstracts, A New Strategy for Creating Journal Articles

You might be interested in this initiative arising out of surgery, and primarily developed by Andrew M. Ibrahim MD, MSc of the University of Michigan. Dr. Ibrahim is a Clinical Lecturer in Surgery here and a Robert Wood Johnson... read more

5 ways to improve care at the End of Life

5 ways to improve care at the End of Life

These days it is much more common for people to live longer with multiple chronic conditions, and we have the technology to prolong life as death approaches. End-of-life care is fragmented, intensive, and costly - and patients’... read more

Guidelines for Family-Centered Care in the Neonatal, Pediatric, and Adult ICU

Guidelines for Family-Centered Care in the Neonatal, Pediatric, and Adult ICU

The primary goal of these guidelines is to identify best practices for family-centered care in the ICU based on existing evidence. These guidelines were developed using a rigorous, objective, and transparent assessment of... read more

Creating a Culture of Caring

Creating a Culture of Caring

How do you build and maintain a culture of shared purpose in the infinitely complex arena of health care? How do you ensure that you engender in employees a dedication and commitment to doing what's right? Identifying the... read more

Patients want to be heard loud and clear!

Patients want to be heard loud and clear!

We congratulate ten Hoorn et al. on their systematic review of communication with ICU patients. Their work in defining an algorithm to assist improving communication options for these patients addresses a clear gap in patient-centred... read more

Five strategies can reduce risk of medical lawsuits

Five strategies can reduce risk of medical lawsuits

Five strategies can be employed by physicians in order to help reduce the risk of lawsuits, according to an article published in Medical Economics.... read more

Communication App Helps Patients Voice Their Needs

Communication App Helps Patients Voice Their Needs

An innovative tablet-based application offers intubated and ventilated intensive care unit (ICU) patients a way to converse with their medical staff.... read more

Telehealth Can Be a Useful Communication Tool in the ICU

Telehealth Can Be a Useful Communication Tool in the ICU

A Penn Medicine study finds that a video-based telehealth platform could improve communications between clinicians and a patient's family members in the always-busy ICU. A telehealth link could be more beneficial to... read more