Improving Documentation at Transistions of Care

In Australia there are an increasing number of people who have complex and chronic healthcare needs, and it is common for their care to be provided by a number of different clinicians and health providers, across many different settings. This includes care delivery across hospitals, private rooms, general practices and other locations.
The points of handover when patients move between clinicians are known as ‘transitions of care’, and these are recognised as times of high risk for patients as there is an increased risk of information being miscommunicated or lost.
There is strong evidence that poor documentation of information at transitions of care is a key safety and quality issue for patients.

Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care (2017). Improving Documentation at Transitions of Care for Complex Patients. 

Lancet 10,000th issue

The 10,000th issue of The Lancet has was published last month with some memories of medical milestones since their first issue in October 1823.  

See their infographic timeline to read the original articles of some celebrated research points over the last 192 years, such as Lister arguing for antiseptic practice in surgery in 1867, the first description of ultrasound in 1958 and the introduction of the Glasgow Coma Scale in 1974.

Cisplatin - 50th anniversary

It is 50 years since the accidental discovery that cisplatin could be used as an anti-cancer drug.  An article in The Conversation this week by Nial Wheate and Michael Apps from the University of Sydney, Happy 50th anniversary to cisplatin, the drug that changed cancer treatment, looks at the history of the drug and explains how it is still relevant in cancer treatment today. The authors also explain that cisplatin is improving in becoming more effective and less toxic.

Medical Heritage Library in the US

There are now nearly 60,000 items stored in the Medical Heritage Library, a specialized research collection stored in the Internet Archive. All of this material can now be discovered through DPLA, an all-digital library that offers a single point of access to millions of items from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States.
New content is searchable as it is deposited and indexed from the MHL Website.

Historical Biomedical Journals free online

The National Library of Medicine and the Wellcome Trust have established an agreement to make 150 years of Biomedical Journals freely available online.This will include thousands of back issues of historically-significant biomedical journals.

Key journals from the last 150 years will be digitized in their entirety and made available on the National Institutes of Health life sciences repository PubMed Central (PMC) and its European counterpart, Europe PMC.   The Wellcome Library, is one of the world's leading library of medical history, and the National Library of Medicine is the world's largest medical library.

Get it Right! Taking a Best Possible Medication History.

Obtaining a best possible medication history, or BPMH, is an important step in medication reconciliation. The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare recently released a training video that guides clinicians on how to obtain an accurate and complete BPMH. By the end of the video, clinicians should be able to:

•  explain how to obtain and record a BPMH
•  explain why at least two sources of information are used to obtain the BPMH
•  understand how medication history taking techniques can influence the accuracy of the BPMH
•  recognise when medication reconciliation should occur and why it is important.

Designed for medical, nursing and pharmacy staff, the video includes a short, role play scenario which highlights the steps in taking a BPMH and provides important tips when reviewing sources of medicines information.
The video can be accessed via the Commission’s YouTube channel.

Medical ethics in history

ABC Radio National's Health Report recently aired a fascinating program entitled, Lack of medical ethics - from the 19th century to Nazi Germany. Paul Weindling, the Wellcome Trust Professor of the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes University, discussed how before the 19th Century, the term "medical ethics" really meant professional courtesy - how doctors related to each other. He went on to describe the origins of modern bioethics and explained that what went on in Nazi Germany and the concentration camps didn't come out of the blue - it was an extension of longstanding medical practices in countries like Britain and the United States, taken to inhuman extremes.
You can listen to the podcast or read the transcript at the Health Report site.