News
World Mental Health Day promotes psychological wellness at work
This year, the World Mental Health Foundation is marking World Mental Health Day with a focus on psychological health and safety in the workplace. Every week in Canada, 500,000 people miss work due to a mental health problem or illness. Given that two-thirds of adults in Canada spend 60% of their waking hours at work, the workplace is an ideal venue to advance this crucial conversation. There are initiatives afoot to tackle this serious concern, such as the CSMLS Mental Health Toolkit.
In a statement by Louise Bradley, President and CEO, Mental Health Commission of Canada, employers around the globe are turning to the National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace. In a recent report, more than 80% of key informants identified the Canadian Standard as the most influential initiative in advancing workplace mental health over the last ten years.
See Canadian labs and medical laboratory academic programs raise awareness for mental health issues in the workplace - Facebook and Twitter
Lab strike in Windsor
Lab assistants and lab technologists at Medical Laboratories of Windsor have gone on strike. Represented by Unifor Local 2458, the staff at all 11 locations of the for-profit patient-testing company began strike action at 12:01 a.m. Monday. According to Tullio DiPonti, Local 2458’s secretary-treasurer, the dispute lies in members working at Medical Laboratories of Windsor being paid half of what people are paid doing similar jobs at hospitals. “These members are performing highly skilled, technical jobs that provide vital medical information for patients,” DiPonti said.
The workers have been without a contract since March 2017. Members in the lab technologist category are paid $22 an hour for their first five years of employment. Members in the lab assistant category are paid $13.50 an hour. Julie Morris, a lab assistant who was picketing said the strike is also about “respect in the workplace” and “better working conditions from management… In the last few years, they’ve cut staff to almost bare bones, to the point where (there are) two people ‘picking’ and (there are) 60 people in the waiting room.”
UCLA’s Ozcan Labs develops portable smartphone DNA detection system that performs as well as clinical laboratory testing
Ozcan Laboratory Group has developed a portable, smartphone-based mobile lab that improves upon the optical detection abilities of current point-of-care nucleic acid tests (POCTs). According to a study published in the American Chemical Society’s ACS Nano is able to “retain the same robust standards of benchtop lab-based tests.” According to an article in Bioscience Technologies, the new smartphone DNA detection system addresses issues with detection of light emitted from intercalator dyes, which are normally “too subtle and unstable for regular cellphone camera sensors.” The new system uses loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) to amplify DNA in connection with a newly developed dye that uses hydroxynaphthol blue (HNB) as an indicator. The development of these smartphone-based tools may provide unique and much-needed equipment for clinical pathologists given the rising interest in mobile healthcare worldwide.
Pre-Analytical
Virtual reality reduces pain, anxiety for kids in hospitals
For a child, even a simple medical procedure like a blood draw, needle poke, or IV insertion can be scary and stressful. Jeffrey I. Gold, Director of the Pediatric Pain Management Clinic at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, and his team are taking a unique approach to reducing distress during blood draws and other procedures by using a virtual reality (VR) game. To study this concept, a clinical trial consisting of 150 kids had their blood drawn using standard practices with or without VR.
In the trial, patients played a VR game called Bear Blast, designed for the purpose of pain management. In the game, kids launch foam balls at silly, cartoon bears just by looking at them. The minimal movement requirements of the game are ideal for medical applications, said Gold, and the simplicity of the game makes it something everyone can enjoy. Gold and his team are also developing VR environments to be used over longer periods of time for children with chronic pain.
Point-of-Care
The journey to 100% point-of-care connectivity
At first glance, the need for centralized connectivity of point-of-care (POC) instruments may seem conceptually at odds with the primary benefit these devices provide. Indeed, caregivers generate results and may well have acted on them by the time POC staff can view test data on their middleware server. Nonetheless, the value of POC connectivity has risen steadily in concert with the growing importance of informatics in care delivery. Connectivity not only facilitates dissemination of clinical data to caregivers across the house but also provides numerous advantages to laboratorians under the broad heading of compliance management. POC connectivity enables labs to keep central oversight of quality control (QC), device management, and user database and competency management, while also supporting automated billing. Read the experience of Duke University Hospital, where the author oversees eight instrument types and 655 instruments connected to a POC data management system.
Transfusion Medicine
Red blood cells for transfusion like a good red: A little older, a little better
In the landmark TRANSFUSE trial, researchers led teams in 5 countries to investigate the effect of the age of transfused red blood cells on critically ill patient's outcomes. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the trial demonstrated that fresher blood was no better than older blood. Unexpectedly they also found fewer transfusion reactions, including fever, with the older blood; and in the most severely ill patients, the transfusion of older blood was associated with fewer deaths. Lead researcher Professor Jamie Cooper said "older blood appears to be like a good red wine- better with some age. The findings of our trial confirm that the current duration of storage of red blood cells for transfusion is both safe and optimal." In Australia, red blood cells are stored for up to 42 days before transfusion. Routine practice in most hospitals is to allocate the oldest available compatible blood.
Anatomic Pathology
Blood test for HPV may help predict risk in cancer patients
Presented results at this year's American Society of Radiation Oncology Annual Meeting suggest a genetic test for HPV16 in the blood could help assess risk for patients and could help identify patients suitable for lower treatment doses. Researchers that developed the test found that circulating HPV16 DNA was detectable in the majority of a group of 47 favorable-risk oropharyngeal cancer patients. In a finding that seems counterintuitive, they also discovered that very low or undetectable HPV16 pretreatment levels in their blood actually had higher risk of persistent or recurrent disease for chemotherapy and radiation treatment. In contrast, patients with high pretreatment levels of HPV16 in their blood had 100% disease control. They hypothesized that, potentially, the patients with undetectable/low pre-treatment HPV16 levels in the blood may have different, more radiation/chemotherapy resistant cancers.
Safety
#SHIFTtalks Supercharge your hand-hygiene education: Are you a Tough Scrubber?
In the Heart and Vascular Program at St. Michael's Hospital, the traditional hand hygiene interventions were feeling a bit stale. Engagement was low and showed in compliance rates. Therefore a new approach, Tough Scrubber, was created by the Quality and Safety Leader Group. Tough Scrubber opened the door to a new way of thinking about hand hygiene. It's OK to ask questions and to give your colleagues feedback – we're all learning. To date, 43 Heart and Vascular staff have completed Tough Scrubber. All it takes is the toolkit, 4-5 hand-hygiene leaders (to run the activity and pose as patients), an empty patient room with two beds, and the everyday equipment described in the scenarios (e.g. a wheelchair, a basin).
Research
Scientists find mechanism aiding flu virus evolution
Research reported in the journal eLife has revealed new details about how flu viruses change frequently. Scientists at MIT have found that invading viruses use a group of proteins called chaperones that are present in cells infected with the virus. These proteins normally have a critical function in making sure other proteins are properly folded, a vital step to ensure they function correctly. Flu viruses don’t have their own chaperones, so they take over the ones in the host cell.
For the first time, it has been shown that the host chaperones are not only crucial to the ability of the virus to replicate, they are also a part of viral mutation or evolution. "Viral proteins are known to interact with host chaperones, so we suspected that this interplay could have a major impact on what evolutionary pathways are available to the virus," explained the senior author of the study, Matthew Shoulders, an Associate Professor of Chemistry. "Our data suggest that, at some point in the future, targeting host chaperones might restrict the ability of a virus to evolve and allow us to kill viruses before they become drug-resistant," he concluded.
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