A patient with congestive heart failure (CHF), who was recently discharged from a nursing home, was experiencing shortness of breath especially at night. He triggered an alert to a triage nurse specialist who called him and […]
Summer/2020
Pharmacy: Leveraging IV Workflow For Error Prevention
The opportunity for medication errors to occur is prevalent when using a manual approach to sterile compounding. Even a small discrepancy can result in devastating consequences.
SBH Health System Opens Geriatric ED
Located in a separate area down the hall from the trauma bay, the new emergency department at SBH dedicated to geriatric patients accommodates four patient beds and includes such features as natural lighting, non-slip floors and […]
A Day In The Life (Of a Psychiatrist in New York City)
Our hospital ethics committee calls an urgent session to consider ventilator allocation as the COVID-19 pandemic is worsening; we review the color-coding system that was developed to classify patients’ mortality rates based on their clinical condition and severity of organ failure.
Reflections from a Chaplain during COVID-19
This time of pandemic reminds me of scenes from the movie Inception. I enter a dream world of empty streets. No people can be seen. I think I’m in the Bronx. Where is everyone? What is everyone doing? Where are the children?
Transitioning Patients From Hospital To Home
The initial meeting didn’t go well. When Yareliz Oliveras, the Hospital-to-Home care coordinator, entered the patient’s room, she quickly saw the handwriting on the wall. “When I went in to see the guy, he cursed at […]
Center for Culinary Medicine/Teaching Kitchen to Open Soon
You are what you eat. This metaphor on life is what makes Chef Emily Schlag’s job so rewarding. Chef Emily, who is also a registered dietitian, is the director of the new Center for Culinary Medicine […]
Doctors Make Major Diet Changes
When not discussing hospital business, their emails, texts and face-to-faces can at times pivot to such abstruse topics as hemp protein and nutritional yeast. Omega 3’s and omega 6’s. Dr. Michael Greger and Mike the Vegan. […]
Telehealth Emerges from the Pandemic
The pandemic, as lethal as it was in the Bronx, gave telehealth much neededlife. Prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, the advent of telehealth was slowed by regulatory burdens. By providers schooled on the importance of touch. […]
The Arrival of Social Emergency Medicine
Social emergency medicine is an emerging branch of emergency medicine. By definition, it’s the interplay of social forces and the emergency care system, and how they interact to affect the health of patients and the community. […]
The Ethical Challenges of COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic presented oursociety with a crisis not seen for generations. One part of the COVID crisis has deep roots in medical ethics. The challenges have ranged from as simple as wearing a mask in public, to
as complex as usage of lifesaving treatments such as ventilators or dialysis. The decisions and judgments made by national leaders, hospitals and at times individual health care providers often invoked
The Importance of Resident Wellbeing
The documentary “Do No Harm,” explores the national suicide crisis among physicians, who kill themselves at a rate twice the national average. Many of these physicians are young (under 40), a significant percentage of whom are […]
Dental Patients Benefit from New Digital Technology
A day after being brutally attacked by an ex-boyfriend wielding a machete, a 20-year-old woman was rushed into an operating room at St. Barnabas Hospital to repair the devastation that had been done to her face. […]
Covid-19 and The ‘Year of The Nurse’
As some of you may know, the World Health Organization named 2020 the “Year of the Nurse and Midwife,” as it is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale. What a year to set aside for nurses! When picturing the year of the nurse, we imagined a celebration – not a pandemic – and certainly would have hoped for a more propitious year.
Retirement Success Is Based On Investment Return And Withdrawal Rate
To be as concise as possible, there are two components which contribute largely to the success of one’s retirement plans: investment return and how much money you need to withdraw from your portfolio, known as your withdrawal rate. This is not to say that there are not other key variables.. But those two are a good place to start when evaluating your retirement prospects.
Covid-19 from an ER Nurse’s Perspective
COVID-19 hit us like a tornado. The hospital system was completely overwhelmed. During this time, I witnessed an unprecedented loss of life. Now I am picking up the pieces, much like a survivor of a massive storm would, returning home to survey the damage.
Two Young Doctors on the Front Lines
Interviews about Covid-19 with Dr. Joshua Schwarzbaum, an emergency medicine attending, and Dr. Isabel Villegas, a PGY3 medicine resident, took place over a 10-week period. Here is a brief look at how The pandemic affected them […]