Lifeboat Foundation

More than 30 years ago, findings from the Harvard Medical Practice Study (HMPS) helped bring public awareness to the problem of patient safety. Since the publication of the HMPS results, new strategies for preventing specific types of adverse events have been put into place, but it has been challenging to measure the impact on patient care.

To better understand what progress has been made in the last few decades, a team from Boston area hospitals conducted the SafeCare Study, which evaluated 11 hospitals in the region.

Led by investigators from Mass General Brigham and sponsored by CRICO, the medical professional liability insurer for the Harvard medical community and its affiliated organizations, the study provides an estimate of adverse events in the inpatient environment, shedding light on the progress of two decades of work focused on improving patient safety and highlighting the need for continued improvement. Results are published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=m0vWME0Mk1Q

Low muscle mass has been linked to cognitive decline with scientists suggesting that measuring muscle mass can help to identify people more at risk of dementia.

Australia’s leading universities say redesign of how students are assessed is ‘critical’ in the face of a revolution in computer-generated text.

Does anyone believe extraterrestrials have visited Earth? I am super curious to see what the members of this group believe!

A habitable zone is an area just the right distance from a star so water can exist on a planet’s surface and the conditions are neither too hot nor too cold for life.

Continue reading “NASA has discovered an Earth-sized planet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star” »

Evolution is characterized as unpredictable, yet orderly. New research into a group of plants suggests it might follow a predictable pattern.

One of the most dreaded effects of the bite of the brown recluse spider (Loxosceles spp) is the appearance of a necrotic skin lesion, but a clinical study by Brazilian researchers recently reported in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases shows that the problem can be solved by administering antivenom, especially if this is done within 48 hours of the incident.

An antivenom produced by Butantan Institute, an arm of the São Paulo State Department of Health, was used in the study. As the authors of the paper explain, there is no consensus regarding the best treatment to avoid necrosis and ulceration in cases of brown recluse spider bites.

A 2009 study involving rabbits showed that necrotic lesions were approximately 30% smaller even when the antivenom was administered 48 hours after the animals were bitten.

An electrically driven motor on the molecular scale based on [3]catenane is described, in which two cyclobis(paraquat-p-phenylene) rings operate by means of redox reactions, demonstrating highly unidirectional movement around a circular loop.

You use them to sit, stand, dance, kick, and run. Find out from WebMD’s slide show what makes your hips hurt, and what you can do about it.

Catalogue of substrate sequences for serine-threonine kinase enzymes.