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A new device that measures stress
Dorothy L. Tengler Mental HealthcareAccording to a new survey from the American Psychological Association, average stress levels in the U.S. rose from 4.9 in 2014 to 5.1 on a 10-point stress scale, and there has been an increase in number of adults who experience extreme stress. Andrew Steckl, an Ohio Eminent Scholar and professor of electrical engineering in the University of Cincinnati's College of Engineering and Applied Science, and his research team have developed a new test that can easily and simply measure common stress hormones using sweat, blood, urine, or saliva. Their unique device measures multiple biomarkers and can be applied to different bodily fluids.
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Ready or not, we die
Lisa Cole Healthcare AdministrationWhat is one of the first things we, as healthcare providers, do when providing acute patient care? Clarify "Do Not Resuscitate" (DNR) status, correct? This singular item informs the patient’s entire plan of care. Yet, how many of us are personally equally prepared? Have we completed what we hammer our clients, colleagues, and clan to do? Ready or not, death will be knocking on our door.
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Noise: An invisible danger in sports and recreation
Sheilamary Koch Recreation & LeisureWhile most people wouldn’t think twice about wearing hearing protection at a noisy workplace, it’s easy to forget that noise can be equally damaging when we’re at play. Many things we do for leisure can put us at risk for noise-induced hearing loss. Dangerously high noise levels are inherent in sports involving ATVs, motorcycles and snowmobiles. Interestingly, excessive noise isn’t always just produced by the machinery being used.
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Report: Millennial workers 5 times more likely to seriously consider suicide…
Terri Williams Mental HealthcareMillennial workers are different from their older workplace counterparts in a variety of ways. However, one difference in particular is cause for alarm. According to a recent report by Catapult Health, millennials are more likely to be depressed and more likely to consider suicide than other generations in the workforce. The report, "Depression and the American Workplace," is based on an analysis of over 150,000 preventive health checkups that Catapult Health conducted in the past year in various workplace settings around the country.
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Healthcare providers on the brink
Keith Carlson Medical & Allied HealthcareNo one in their right mind would argue that healthcare careers aren’t stressful. Burnout, depression, stress-based illness, and even suicide are common in certain populations of healthcare workers. If our nation and the world depend upon nurses, doctors, pharmacists, and other professionals to provide care that millions of patients require, why are we ignoring the stressors that cause healthcare providers to develop debilitating symptoms, abandon their careers, or even take their own lives?
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6 simple ways to boost your hospital’s hand-washing compliance
Lisa Mulcahy Medical & Allied HealthcareYour hospital staff knows that hand-washing is essential for reducing infection rates, but sometimes they may cut corners when it comes to compliance. Stress, fatigue, and high workloads can lead to your doctors, nurses and workers skipping proper and continual hygiene steps. Also, patients very rarely wash their hands when they're in bed — and their visitors almost never make it a practice to so, either. Yet, boosting compliance rates can be much easier than you think. Here are six surprising (and easy) ways to identify hygiene risk situations and quickly fix them to protect everyone in your care environment.
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Alone, but not lonely: The rejuvenating benefits of solitude
Victoria Fann Mental HealthcareWhile loneliness is an epidemic in this country with half of Americans admitting they feel lonely, being alone isn’t all bad. In fact, it’s good. I’m not talking about extreme isolation here, which can severely impact mental and physical health. Instead, I’m talking about good, old-fashioned quiet time. However, with smartphones, smartwatches, tablets, computers, and most recently AI, are we ever really alone? A new field of study called interruption science, which studies how interruptions affect human performance, found that, on average, we are interrupted every 11 minutes and that it takes almost 25 minutes to recover from a phone call.
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Study: 3 in 10 toddlers spending less than 3 hours outside per week
Jackie Cambridge Medical & Allied HealthcareA recent study by Kiddi Caru asked U.K. parents about the amount of outdoor time their child gets, weather permitting. 31% said they get three hours or less weekly outdoor time, in spite of 100% of respondents agreeing that outdoor time is crucial to a child’s development. This is surprisingly little, considering the same percentage (31%) get two to three hours of screen time per day, with 11% getting over four hours daily.
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Study: Cardiac resuscitation outside the hospital performed less frequently…
Dorothy L. Tengler Medical & Allied HealthcareAlthough death and disability have been significantly reduced by bystander interventions such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation, out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) was the third leading cause of health loss due to disease in the U.S. behind ischemic heart disease and low back/neck pain, according to the most recent data. In a recent study, led by cardiologist Dr. Hanno Tan at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, researchers aimed to provide a comprehensive overall view on sex differences in care utilization and outcome of OHCA.
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8 great ways wine may make you healthier
Lisa Mulcahy Medical & Allied HealthcareYou probably didn’t need any more reasons to have a glass of wine after work. However, your favorite beverage can help make you healthier than ever! Read on for eight ways research has shown wine to be beneficial to the human body.
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