The New York Times recently reviewed a book entitled Reflections on Doctors: Nurses’ Stories About Physicians and Surgeons. I decided I had to check it out for myself.

In this book the editor, Terry Ratner, has gathered a collection of stories and anectdotes about the working relationship between physicians and nurses.  The editor poses the question:

Has the working relationship between doctors and nurses really changed from the older patriarchal tone of the classic television shows depicting sovreign rulership and sexual escapades between all knowing physicians and their hospital servants in their neatly pressed white uniforms?

The book contains 19 short essays written nurses on the front lines, depicting their encounters with physicians both positive and negative.  Featuring stories from as far afield as public health, home birth, and missions of mercy in Kosovo, the book represents a view into the inherent differences in the clinical approaches to patient care between two very different medical professions.

This book represents an excellent resource of insight and entertainment for nurses and those in nursing schools. There are many more stories than just the 19 stories mentioned here.

What are your stories?  Share them with me here at the Nursing Show.  You can comment on them using the comments link below or you can contact me by email and send them along to Comments@NursingShow.com

I saw this article at CNN.com and couldn’t resist sharing it with you.  The next time you take your CPR refresher, don’t forget to bring your mirror ball and platform shoes.  Nurses who use their 70’s disco cred could end up saving more lives with more effective compressions.

(c’mon, you know you remember disco)

The song “Staying Alive” from the disco era classic “Saturday Night Fever” is apparently the perfect beat to learn CPR compressions.  At 103 beats per minute, the catchy tune gives CPR students something they can remember to get up to speed when performing compressions.

This is a great idea and I love articles that point out clever instructors thinking outside of the box about class motivation and learning.  We’ll all get a chuckle but, more importantly, we’ll all remember the proper pacing and rhythm and that’s what it is all about.  Bring along your music players to the next community CPR class and let them all boogie to the beat!

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Find and buy the Bee Gees “Stayin Alive” at iTunes and have some fun at your next CPR Class!

Deciphering the two presidential candidates’ health care reform plans is a daunting task.  Both sides play with numbers in ways that would make Enron’s accountants jealous.  The only fact that remains true for both sides is that the current system, while maybe not broken completely, has some serious cracks.

Nurses and other medical caregivers on the front lines of the health care system know that something needs to change.  People without insurance use emergency departments as their primary care doctors. Aging populations and shortages of medical professionals at all levels are causing holes in the continuum of care.  Patient safety issues are in the forefront of the Joint Commission’s goals and yet the current system is set up for patient safety disasters.

Nurses Care About Health Care

This article from the Atlanta Journal Constitution focuses on the two competing health care plans proposed by the candidates and looks at how they relate to the current system in their region.  It doesn’t matter on which side of the issue you fall, as a nurse, you need to educate yourself about the differences.  The final plan will ultimately be a compromise of some sort and will incorporate aspects of both options.

In a recent session of the Pennsylvania state legislature, both the Senate and the House passed a bill limiting the way hospitals and other healthcare facilities deal with overtime for their nurses and other healthcare workers.

Nursing Overtime Bill Passes Nearly Unanimously

The Pennsylvania Senate passed the bill unanimously (49-0) and the House passed it by nearly the same margin (189-11).  Governor Ed Rendell is expected to sign the bill into law.

The new law will take effect July 1, 2009 and would ban facilities from requiring mandatory overtime. After 12 hours on a shift, nurses may voluntarily stay and work additional hours but could not be required to do so or have their jobs threatened.

The article at Medical News Today cited a few exceptions to the ban on overtime:

“. . . unforeseeable, declared national, state or municipal emergency; if there is a highly unpredictable and extraordinary event, such as a terrorist attack; or when a facility has a large amount of unforeseen absences by employees.”

This is an important step towards providing for safer patient care.  Nurses and other healthcare workers will be able to better focus on good patient care when they are better rested and not overworked.

I’ve picked up on another way to keep the listeners and site visitors up to date on what’s going on around MedicCast Productions Central as well as in my general travels.  Get the updates by following me over at twitter.com.

You’ll hear about upcoming interviews, segment ideas before I’ve figured it all out for the show, and more!

http://www.twitter.com/podmedic

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Want even more? Friend me up on Facebook (podmedic) or on MySpace (podmedic or nursingshow).

I posted previously about the Medicast Podcaster’s meetup at the recent New Media Expo in Las Vegas. The meetup was a great opportunity to talk with each other about our podcasts, plan cross promotion ventures, and discuss how we grew our audiences, monetized our shows, and promoted medical podcasting in general.

I forgot that we had taken a few pictures of the event. Here is a group photo of those who attended the meet up. I hope we’ll have a good turnout again next year and add some new faces to the mix, too! From left to right: Richard and Kelly Fujikawa, Jamie Davis, Amy Davis, Matt Gunn, Carina Stanton, David Van Nuys, Shwen Gwee.

(Thanks to the folks from Raw Voice, Inc. for sharing their insights during the meetup and taking this photo for us!)

I found this review of the MedicCast Network over at the Materia Medica blog at Blogspot.com.  I love it when I find that people are happy with the content here at the MedicCast podcast.  This article recommends the show to any and all medical professionals from doctors and nurses all the way to EMTs and paramedics.

Thanks to Raphael, the author of the blog for the kind words.  It’s an honor to provide resources for this community. If you have a blog, write a review of the MedicCast or Nursing Show sites and podcasts.  I’ll return the favor and definitely add you to the MedicCast and Nursing Show blog rolls.

I recently returned from the New Media Expo. The expo was a great opportunity to meet other podcasters and spread the word about the Science Podcasters site. Here are my impressions and a few of the people I met. My goals for Science Podcasters were to invite other science and medical podcasters to join the site and to run the Medical podcaster’s meet up.

I’ll start off with the Medical Podcaster’s meet up which was held on Friday morning before the Will It Blend keynote. In attendance were:

• David Van Nuys (Dr. Dave) from The Shrink Rap Radio Podcast
• Shwen Gwee from the Med 2.0 Podcast
• Matt Gunn and Carina Stanton from AORN (Association of periOperative Registered Nurses)
• And me, Jamie Davis from the MedicCast and Nursing Show podcasts.

Also in attendance at my invitation were the guys from RawVoice.com. They are working to help arrange avenues for advertising in the medical and science space. They are all podcasters themselves and run the Blubrry Podcast community. They offered some insights into promoting podcasts, gaining listeners, and attracting advertising.

The group discussed how we marketed our podcasts and we all decided that we should do more cross promotion between medical and science podcasts. Dr. Dave offered to interview others on any psychological topic or to be interviewed on someone else’s show. The folks from AORN are just getting started in podcasting for their membership and welcome input and crossover promotion.

Also discussed were methods of gaining and assessing audience and website statistics. The Raw Voice team has a pretty good statistics package in both a free and a premium version. Barry Kranz from Raw Voice also suggested Quantcast.com as a way to gain info on site traffic. Other statistics sources included Podtrac’s free stats program and the resources available through Libsyn.com and Wizzard Media.

There were also some discussions about the gathering of survey information about listeners. Survey Monkey came up as a service that offers both free and paid services. Also, both Wizzard Media and Podtrac offer advertiser surveys for podcasters.

In addition to the Medical Podcasters Meet up, I also had an opportunity to talk with many other science and medical podcasters, including Donovan Steutel from ScienceAudio.net and Robert Frederick from Science Magazine. I invited them to check out the Science Podcasters site and consider joining in the cross promotion of their podcasts and sites.

In the NME exhibit hall, I found many vendors focused on helping podcasters to use online video. For those of us in the education sector, there were several options available in both software and hardware. Since I was speaking about using podcasting and new media in higher education, I was interested in ways lecturers could record their classes for later use by students.

Two software options stood out for the education marketplace. On the individual podcasters or instructor level there was Profcast from Humble Daisy software. This is currently a Mac only application but a windows version is on the way. For institutional uses, there is Panopto.com. This software package may be free to educational institutions under their charter from Carnegie Mellon University where it was developed.

The expo was a huge success from my viewpoint and I can’t wait for next year’s show. If you are a science or medical podcaster, you need to make plans to attend next year’s show.

Press Release, August 1, 2008

National EMS Memorial Bike Ride

The National EMS Memorial Bike Ride has announced a search to find an official logo for the 2009 ride. The 2008 logo (the biker in the ribbon) has served us well, but, with a new year and a new ride, it only seemed right that there also be a new logo.

Several artists have already shown their work and the Board of Directors decided it would be fun to allow anyone interested the opportunity to submit candidates for the 2009 logo.

The contest runs from August 1, 2008 through September 1, 2008. The winning artist’s work will be prominently displayed on the 2009 jersey, website and our always popular fund-raising t-shirt.

Those interested are encouraged to submit their work to contest@muddyangels.org.

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EMTs and Paramedics die in the line of duty every year and the EMS Memorial Bike Ride is just one of the ways that EMS providers and others in the medical community recognize their own. Visit their site and lend your support. If you have a good eye for graphic design, take a swing at the new logo for them.

Jamie, the Podmedic

A recent article over at Yahoo Health focuses on the best and worst restaurant menus.

The authors of the article looked at 43 national chain restaurants and judged their food choices based on the nutritional value of the individual items. They judged the menus based on the following criteria:

• healthy vegetable sides
• calories in kid menu items
• healthy, kid friendly adult menu items
• presence of trans fats
• non-soda drinks

The best restaurants on their list included Chick-fil-A, Subway, Boston Markets, and (surprise) McDonald’s. These four chain restaurants score As or Bs on the chart. For the restaurants on the low end in the article, the authors chose Applebee’s, IHOP, Olive Garden, Outback, Red Lobster, and T.G.I. Friday’s. For the rest of the list and more on the criteria they used, check out the article link above.

Listings like this give us all more options when helping our patients to make healthier choices. Keep your eyes open for news items and keep the articles or links so that you can refer your patients to these resources. Another resource is to contact dietitians in your facility or area to get tips from them. Many will have hand outs for you to hold on to so you have things to hand out to your patients when they need that kind of pocket reinforcement.

More nutritional information is available from the authors’ site at Men’sHealth.com at Eat This Not That? Sign up for their free weekly newsletter.

And introducing: Eat This, Not That Mobile! Now get the exclusive healthy eating info you need at any market, restaurant or roadside stand—instantly!