What if you’re in surgery and the power goes out? No lights, no oxygen — and your anesthesia stops flowing. It happens constantly in hospitals throughout the world, turning routine procedures into tragedies. Erica Frenkel demos one solution: the universal anesthesia machine.

The solution to 18 power outages a month.

 

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Dan Roam – Vivid Grammar from Duarte Design on Vimeo.

Dan Roam used the rules of verbal grammar to build a Visual Grammar Graph that bridges the gap between verbal and visual concepts. Vivid Grammar is featured in his new book, BLAH BLAH BLAH.

How to translate your verbal message into a visual concept. Amazing solution.

Thanks to Duarte Blog

 

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The problem: young adults have a high prevalence of mental health problems (up to 25% in a year), the usually don’t tend to seek help for these problems. About 78% of American young adults look online for information about health. 18-39% of young adults write blogs or an online journal.

A recent article was published from authors who conducted a qualitative grounded theory analysis of the blogs of young adults (18–25 years of age) who were specifically blogging about their experiences with mental health problems. The researchers did this in order to understand why young adults are particularly unlikely to access treatment for their mental health problems. They wanted to inspect these blogs and online journal to learn the specific beliefs and experiences of young adults with mental illness.

Two core categories emerged from the qualitative analysis of the bloggers accounts: I am powerless (intrapersonal) and I am utterly alone (interpersonal). Overall, the young adult bloggers expressed significant feelings of powerlessness as a result of their mental health concerns and simultaneously felt a profound sense of loneliness, alienation, and lack of connection with others.

Why is this important?

Young adults don’t seek treatment because they have a negative view on the metal health system. The mental health system should educate others more in contact with young adults. They should also create a more welcoming, supportive environments that also facilitate choice in care.

Marcus, M., Westra, H., Eastwood, J., Barnes, K., & , . (2012). What Are Young Adults Saying About Mental Health? An Analysis of Internet Blogs Journal of Medical Internet Research, 14 (1) DOI: 10.2196/jmir.1868

 

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Every doctor makes mistakes. But, says physician Brian Goldman, medicine’s culture of denial (and shame) keeps doctors from ever talking about those mistakes, or using them to learn and improve. Telling stories from his own long practice, he calls on doctors to start talking about being wrong.

 

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Today, Your Life on USA Today is guest-hosting Grand Rounds, the best of the medical blogosphere. We asked medical bloggers to send us the finest posts from the past few months, and were thrilled to receive more than 100 entries. I, Dr. Val Jones, have prepared a summary of my favorites.

They will publish the Grand Rounds in 4 posts – one at 10am, one at 1pm, one at 5pm and one at 8pm tomorrow. There are 4 sections (to be released throughout the day). Please check back.

 

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Research shows you can improve your self-representation through faceboook and other social media with several techniques:

• spending more time with greater cognitive resources to edit the messages
• carefully selecting photographs
• highlighting your positive attributes
• presenting an ideal self
• having a deeper self-disclosure
• managing the styles of your language
• providing a set of links to other sites or associating themselves with certain people, symbols, and material objects

Presenting yourself in a more positive way on Facebook is a way to manage other’s impressions of you. According to a recent publication on research with undergraduates to the impact of Facebook on users’ perceptions toward others, it found a relationship with duration of Facebook use and time spent on Facebook.

The multivariate analysis indicated that those who have used Facebook longer agreed more that others were happier, and agreed less that life is fair, and those spending more time on Facebook each week agreed more that others were happier and had better lives. Furthermore, those that included more people whom they did not personally know as their Facebook ‘‘friends’’ agreed more that others had better lives.

Proof of shallow contact distorting perception of others and a plea for face to face interaction. This research had also shown that the more time people spent going out with their friends, the less they agreed that others have better lives and are happier. What do you think?

Chou, H., & Edge, N. (2011). “They Are Happier and Having Better Lives than I Am”: The Impact of Using Facebook on Perceptions of Others’ Lives Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2011.0324

 

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Interesting video with an important message, the same goes for internet addiction….

a parallel between the industrialization of food, which at once allowed for ever-greater efficiency and reined in an obesity epidemic, and the industrialization of information, arguing that blaming the abundance of information itself is as absurd as blaming the abundance of food for obesity.

Thanks Brain Pickings

 

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Impressive and explanatory graphics and videos

We have no ways to directly observe molecules and what they do — Drew Berry wants to change that. At TEDxSydney he shows his scientifically accurate (and entertaining!) animations that help researchers see unseeable processes within our own cells.

 

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This thoughtful and enlightening ten minute programme, edited and narrated by consultant psychiatrist Dr Mark Salter, explores the causes and consequences of stigma against mental illness and challenges us to rethink our attitudes towards people with mental health problems. The style is a montage of still images with music and commentary. Powerful and thought-provoking.

Stigma because we don’t understand mental illness…..

 

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The two approaches to patient safety are the person approach and the system approach. The personal approach is the most encountered and outdated kind of approach in medicine. In short, errors are seen as shortcomings of medical personnel such as forgetfulness, inattention, poor motivation negligence and recklessness. The response is mostly naming, blaming, and shaming. Errors are treated as moral issues assuming that bad things happen to bad people.

Seeking as far as possible to uncouple a person’s unsafe acts from any institutional responsibility is clearly in the interests of managers. It is also legally more convenient, at least in Britain.

It’s shortcoming are the lack of a reporting culture. In aviation about 90% of quality lapses are judged as blameless. Without reporting the errors, near misses and such due to the blaming culture most error traps are undiscovered. The personal approach also isolates errors from their system context. This causes errors to fall into recurrent patterns.

The personal approach is not the right practice in such complex organizations as most medical institutes are.

The system approach views humans as fallible and errors are to be expected especially in these complex organizations and professions.

Errors are seen as consequences rather than causes having their origins not so much in the perversity of human nature as in “upstream” systemic factors.

An important aspect of errors are failures in latent conditions. They result from decisions made on a different level such as the construction of procedures, the making of protocols. These decisions are usually made by designers, builders and top level management. These decisions can be at fault using the procedures, building and protocols.

To use another analogy: active failures are like mosquitoes. They can be swatted one by one, but they still keep coming. The best remedies are to create more effective defences and to drain the swamps in which they breed. The swamps, in this case, are the ever present latent conditions.

This is a summary of an important publication on patient safety. It goes into more detail about the differences between these two approaches especially with examples of other high reliability organizations such as nuclear aircraft carriers, air traffic control centers and nuclear power plants. The most important difference with medicine is the collective preoccupation with the possibility of failure.

Instead of isolating failures, they generalise them. Instead of making local repairs, they look for sys­tem reforms.

A lot of work to be done before patient safety is fully implemented in medicine.

Reason, J. (2000). Human error: models and management BMJ, 320 (7237), 768-770 DOI: 10.1136/bmj.320.7237.768

 

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