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Source: National Association of Community Health Centers

Source: National Association of Community Health Centers

Will someone please explain the logic behind proposed cuts to the budgets of community health centers? Ellen-Marie Whelan, Phd, RN, Senior Health Policy Analyst and Associate Director of Health Policy at the Center for American Progress (and CHMP National Advisory Council member) reports that proposed cuts to the budget and repeal of the Affordable Care Act would eliminate jobs and impede our countries mandate to build a better primary care infrastructure to control health care costs: “Repeal of the Affordable Care Act and the new funding it provides to community health centers will eliminate nearly 300,000 jobs in 2015. We estimate that when the proposed budget cuts in funding for the rest of the 2011 fiscal year are combined with health center funds lost through repeal of the Affordable Care Act, more than 178,000 jobs would be lost this year alone.” I see no rational reason to make these cuts. Do you? (Read her full report at http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/02/healthcenters.html)

Diana J. Mason, PhD, RN, FAAN, Rudin Professor of Nursing

[caption id="attachment_10522" align="alignleft" width="196"] Source: National Association

The Clearings of Narrative Medicine, or How the Sick and Those Who Care for Them Can Unite
A lecture by
Dr. Rita Charon, M.D., Ph.D.

Thursday, February 17th, 6:00-7:30 PM
Davis Auditorium, Schapiro CEPSR Building
513 W. 120th St, New York, NY 10025

This lecture will describe the emergence of narrative medicine at Columbia and the uses to which it has been put.  By describing some of the clinical routines, training consequences, and on-going scholarly projects of narrative medicine, Dr. Charon will try to convey the visions of narrative medicine’s collaborative and relational practice of health care.

Rita Charon, M.D., Ph.D. is Professor of Clinical Medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine. She is a general internist in practice in the Associates of Internal Medicine in Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Charon graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1978 and trained in internal medicine at the Residency Program in Social Medicine at Montefiore Hospital in New York. She completed the Ph.D. in the Department of English of Columbia in 1999, writing on the late works of Henry James and on literary analyses of medical texts.  In 2000, she founded and now directs the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia.

Dr. Charon has designed and directed Columbia’s teaching programs in medical interviewing, humanities and medicine, and narrative medicine. She teaches in Columbia’s English department as well. She has published and lectured extensively in  medical and literary journals on linguistic studies of doctor-patient conversations, narrative competence in physicians and medical students, narrative ethics, and empathy in medical practice. With the Core Faculty in Narrative Medicine at Columbia, she inaugurated the Master of Science in Narrative Medicine at Columbia in 2009, the first graduate program of its kind. Dr. Charon has been honored with a Kaiser Faculty Scholar Award, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and multiple clinical and literary awards and honors. Her research has been supported by the NIH, the NEH, and several private foundations. She is the author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness and co-editor of Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics and Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine. She is working on a book on Henry James.
All CSSR Seminars are free and open to the public.

Pre-registration for this event at http://cssr.ei.columbia.edu/?id=rsvp is optional but recommended.

The CSSR Spring 2011 Seminar Series is offered with the support of the Earth Institute and Portales Partners, LLC.

The Clearings of Narrative Medicine, or How

philips_mrx_hospital_lg4When you think of visiting a loved one during a hospital stay, what’s the most vivid sense memory you have? The disinfectant smell? The Purell dispensers at every doorway? The crinkly paper gowns and sheets on the way to and from the OR?

For workers in hospitals, particularly nurses, one element is getting media attention this week: the sound of monitors and alarms going off.

According to the Boston Globe’s Liz Kowalczyk, at one 15-bed unit at Johns Hopkins, over 940 alarms go off per day – that’s one alarm every 90 seconds.

This Sunday, the Boston Globe published Kowalczyk’s piece, “For Nurses, It’s A Constant Dash To Respond To Alarms.” NPR covered the article yesterday in a segment called “Nurses Can Become Desensitized To Hospital Sounds.

Another Kowalczyk article, also published in the Globe, also with a run date of February 13, was called “Patient Alarms Often Unheard, Unheeded.” That article attributes over 200 deaths in the last 5 years to late response to alarms. Notably, it takes the focus off nurses in its title and subheadline, describing instead how “hospital staff” may fail to respond.

NPR’s Michelle Norris asked Kowalczyk how nurses have responded to her articles. She responded:

“You know, I was very worried about the reaction from the nursing community because I didn’t want the stories to feel like we were blaming them for something. And, actually, I was pleasantly surprised that they have acknowledged and confirmed that this is a big problem that they face. And they feel like it’s very valuable to get a discussion of this out in the open.”

What’s your take? Are nurses getting an unfair hit here, or do these pieces point to systematic problems with overuse of monitors?

When you think of visiting a loved