Two new advanced predictive algorithms use information about a person's health conditions and simple blood tests to accurately predict a patient's chances of having a currently undiagnosed cancer, including hard to diagnose liver and oral cancers. The new models could revolutionise how cancer is detected in primary care, and make it easier for patients to get treatment at much earlier stages. The NHS currently uses prediction algorithms, such as the QCancer scores, to combine relevant information from patient data and identify individuals deemed at high risk of having a currently undiagnosed cancer, enabling GPs and specialists to call them in for further testing. Researchers from Queen Mary University of London and the University of Oxford have used the anonymised electronic health records from over 7.4 million adults in England to create two new algorithms which are much more sensitive than existing models, and which could lead to better clinical decision making and potentially earlier diagnosis of cancer. Crucially, in addition to information about a patient's age, family history, medical diagnoses, symptoms, and general health, the new algorithms incorporated the results of seven routine blood tests (which measure a person's full blood count and test liver function) as biomarkers to improve early cancer diagnosis. Compared with the existing QCancer algorithms, the new models identified four additional medical conditions associated with an increased risk of 15 different cancers including those affecting the liver, kidneys, and pancreas. Two additional associations were also found for family history with lung cancer and blood cancer, and seven new symptoms of concern (including itching, bruising, back pain, hoarseness, flatulence, abdominal mass, dark urine) were identified as being associated with multiple cancer types. These results showed that the new algorithms offer much improved diagnostic capabilities, and in fact are the only ones currently which can be used in primary care settings to estimate the likelihood of having a current but as yet undiagnosed liver cancer. These algorithms are designed to be embedded into clinical systems and used during routine GP consultations. They offer a substantial improvement over current models, with higher accuracy in identifying cancers - especially at early, more treatable stages. They use existing blood test results which are already in the patients' records making this an affordable and efficient approach to help the NHS meet its targets to improve its record on diagnosing cancer early by 2028." They offer the potential for enabling earlier cancer diagnoses in people from the age of 18 onwards, including for some rare types of cancer type." In this interview, industry expert Dr. Lohit Khera discusses the evolving role of microRNA in research, diagnostics, and precision medicine, highlighting the latest innovations in RNA extraction and analysis Learn how experts are advancing benzodiazepine analysis and detection using insights from the lab. News-Medical.Net provides this medical information service in accordance with these terms and conditions. Please note that medical information found on this website is designed to support, not to replace the relationship between patient and physician/doctor and the medical advice they may provide. Hi, I'm Azthena, you can trust me to find commercial scientific answers from News-Medical.net. Registered members can chat with Azthena, request quotations, download pdf's, brochures and subscribe to our related newsletter content. A few things you need to know before we start. While we only use edited and approved content for Azthena answers, it may on occasions provide incorrect responses. Please confirm any data provided with the related suppliers or authors. Your questions, but not your email details will be shared with OpenAI and retained for 30 days in accordance with their privacy principles. Please do not ask questions that use sensitive or confidential information.

More people are landing in the hospital with cannabis-related problems-and for many, a mental health condition is the primary issue, according to a new study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. Among those visits, one quarter ended up with a primary diagnosis of a mental health condition, including bipolar disorder, depression, and psychotic disorder. That compared with only about 3% of visits unrelated to cannabis. The reasons for the rising rate of cannabis-related visits are unclear, according to lead researcher Madeline Meier, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University, in Tempe, Ariz. But, she said, legalization of non-medical (recreational) cannabis use is not to blame: Arizona legalized non-medical use for adults in late 2020, with sales beginning in 2021-too late to explain the trends seen during the study period. On the other hand, Meier said, medical use of cannabis was legal in Arizona throughout the study period. So it's possible that easier access to the drug is partly responsible for the trends her team found. Meier noted that when states have less-restrictive policies on medical cannabis-such as making it available in dispensaries rather than pharmacies-that can make it easier for any adult to get the drug. The findings also raise other key questions: Why do so many people with cannabis-related hospital visits have a mental health condition, and why is the connection between the two growing stronger over time? "There are many possible explanations, and this study can't address them," Meier said. But based on other research, she said, one possibility is that cannabis use led to mental health conditions in some people. Another is that some people were using cannabis to treat mental health symptoms-and that tendency increased over time. If that's the case, Meier said, it points to a need for better public education. "I think it's important for people to be aware that the science on using cannabis to treat mental health problems is really not there yet," she said. "In fact, there is evidence suggesting that cannabis use can worsen mental health conditions, or even increase the risk of developing them." The study also found some interesting patterns related to age: Older adults (age 65 and up) showed a bigger jump in cannabis-related hospitalizations between 2016 and 2021, versus other adults. And the growing tendency for those hospitalizations to be linked to mental health conditions was most pronounced among older adults. That's not necessarily surprising, Meier said, given Baby Boomers' permissive attitudes about cannabis use. In this interview, industry expert Dr. Lohit Khera discusses the evolving role of microRNA in research, diagnostics, and precision medicine, highlighting the latest innovations in RNA extraction and analysis Learn how experts are advancing benzodiazepine analysis and detection using insights from the lab. News-Medical.Net provides this medical information service in accordance with these terms and conditions. Please note that medical information found on this website is designed to support, not to replace the relationship between patient and physician/doctor and the medical advice they may provide. Hi, I'm Azthena, you can trust me to find commercial scientific answers from News-Medical.net. Registered members can chat with Azthena, request quotations, download pdf's, brochures and subscribe to our related newsletter content. A few things you need to know before we start. While we only use edited and approved content for Azthena answers, it may on occasions provide incorrect responses. Please confirm any data provided with the related suppliers or authors. Your questions, but not your email details will be shared with OpenAI and retained for 30 days in accordance with their privacy principles. Please do not ask questions that use sensitive or confidential information.

A quarter of women who gave birth in metropolitan France and were surveyed reported that they were treated disrespectfully during childbirth and/or while staying in the hospital after giving birth. Among the 7,332 women surveyed in the Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica study, 1,888 reported that they experienced words, gestures, or attitudes that shocked, offended, or made them feel uncomfortable from health care professionals. They were more frequently nulliparous, had a high education level, a birth plan, and an instrumental or cesarean birth. Women with psychiatric history or prenatal psychological distress were also more likely to experience disrespectful care. Disrespectful care was also reported more frequently when women breastfed. "Professionals should welcome women's birth plans as a means of communicating their wishes and should treat them with respect, even when medical complications arise," the authors wrote. "This study highlights the need for the healthcare system to further develop training for healthcare professionals and consider a thorough overhaul of its functioning to foster an environment where more women experience respectful maternity care." In this interview, industry expert Dr. Lohit Khera discusses the evolving role of microRNA in research, diagnostics, and precision medicine, highlighting the latest innovations in RNA extraction and analysis Learn how experts are advancing benzodiazepine analysis and detection using insights from the lab. News-Medical.Net provides this medical information service in accordance with these terms and conditions. Please note that medical information found on this website is designed to support, not to replace the relationship between patient and physician/doctor and the medical advice they may provide. Hi, I'm Azthena, you can trust me to find commercial scientific answers from News-Medical.net. Registered members can chat with Azthena, request quotations, download pdf's, brochures and subscribe to our related newsletter content. A few things you need to know before we start. Please check the box above to proceed. While we only use edited and approved content for Azthena answers, it may on occasions provide incorrect responses. Please confirm any data provided with the related suppliers or authors. Your questions, but not your email details will be shared with OpenAI and retained for 30 days in accordance with their privacy principles. Please do not ask questions that use sensitive or confidential information.

They lose some volume, becoming smaller, which can lead to cognitive issues, such as problems remembering things. Past studies show there are a number of ways in which people can help retain brain health as they age, including following a healthy diet, getting enough quality sleep, quitting smoking, getting enough mental stimulation through activities like puzzles and reading, and being physically active. “Thus, there is a clear need for further research to better understand cognitive aging and how we can promote brain health across the lifespan. Physical activity is a lifestyle behavior that may play a role in not only the prevention and attenuation of cognitive decline, but the promotion of cognitive function in late life,“ Collins explained. Examples of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity include jogging or running, brisk walking, swimming, cycling, playing tennis, and dancing. “Therefore, we examined 24-hour time-use composition in order to understand whether the way time is used across the day may be differentially related to cognitive function in late adulthood.” “This means that time spent in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity may not influence all domains of cognitive function uniformly. However, the reason for this remains a matter of speculation and will need further research,” she cautioned. Additionally, the researchers discovered that the biggest cognitive gains were seen in participants who went from doing no moderate-to-vigorous physical activity to a minimum of 5 minutes a day. “Our results suggest that hypothetically reallocating time to moderate-to-vigorous physical activity may be beneficial for cognitive function, regardless of what lifestyle behavior this time was reallocated from,” Collins said. “Our study highlights the importance of increasing and/or maintaining time spent in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity for cognitive function in late adulthood, specifically for domains of processing speed, working memory, and executive function,” she continued. MNT had the opportunity to speak with Raphael Wald, PsyD, a neuropsychologist at Marcus Neuroscience Institute, part of Baptist Health South Florida, about this study. “The results are not shocking but helpful in pointing to the importance of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity — assuming a person is healthy enough to do so — rather than lighter exercise as an important factor in cognitive functioning,” Wald, who was not involved in this research, commented. “Exercise, in general, is crucial for our brain and heart health as we age.” “Increasing age is the biggest risk factor for dementia, which in turn means that dementia is becoming a bigger health crisis than it was in the past.” “In my experience, many older adults have physical limitations like arthritis that prevent them from being able to exercise vigorously. I think it would be helpful to examine the motivation for exercise in individuals with these limitations. MNT also spoke to Gary Small, MD, chair of psychiatry for Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey and author of more than a dozen books on brain health and aging, about this research. “The finding that even short bursts of moderate-to-vigorous exercise can bolster brain health is encouraging that people need not become triathletes to protect their mental abilities as they age.” This podcast episode examines two studies that assess the impact type 2 diabetes has on brain health and explores three lifestyle interventions that… In this episode of our podcast, editors Maria Cohut and Yasemin Nicola Sakay discuss how extreme exercise may help people live longer with Michael…

Bishal Gyawali, MD, PhD Associate Professor, Department of Oncology, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada Disclosure: Bishal Gyawali, MD, PhD, has disclosed the following financial relationships:Serve(d) as a consultant for: Vivio Health Disclosure: Bishal Gyawali, MD, PhD, has disclosed the following financial relationships:Serve(d) as a consultant for: Vivio Health This is Dr Bishal Gyawali, from Queens University, Kingston, Canada, continuing with our Skills Lab series on how to interpret the clinical trial publication well. In the past few videos, we have discussed the methods section and we touched briefly on surrogate endpoints. This is a pretty big topic, so we will continue discussing surrogate endpoints today.There is much confusion about surrogate endpoints. There are several questions that people ask about surrogate endpoints. In these videos, we're trying to answer those, but it may not be comprehensive. If you want to get a comprehensive understanding of almost all the questions regarding surrogate endpoints in oncology, I highly recommend you read this publication, which we have recently published and is open access. Continuing with surrogate endpoints, we discussed in the last presentation about how to differentiate between prognostic and predictive surrogate endpoints. Today, let's talk about how we classify and define them. These are usually defined on the basis of criteria known as RECIST. RECIST stands for Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors, and that's classically what almost every clinical trial uses to define the surrogate endpoints in the advanced setting. Why was this developed in the first place? It was not developed to make therapeutic decisions or intended for drug approvals. The whole idea around RECIST was to help clinical trials define success or lack of success early on, without the need to wait for overall survival.The goal was to make those decisions about whether these should be tested in a phase 3, from a phase 2, and so on. You can read the RECIST publication in detail, but briefly, to classify under RECIST, you need a target lesion. Any of these will classify as disease progression, so we classically keep talking about progressive disease as a 20% increase in the size of the tumor. Anything in between, meaning the tumor size has decreased less than 30%, or the tumor size has increased less than 20%, is called a stable disease. There are also some other, what I call make-believe, meaningless endpoints. These do not correlate with any meaningful endpoint. People should not focus on the clinical benefit rate. Why we're defining this is to see why t hese surrogate endpoints do not necessarily correlate with overall survival or quality of life: (a) because these were not intended to be used as such; and (b) the way we define them is quite arbitrary. As you can see, there is nothing magical that happens at 20% progression or 30% shrinkage of the tumor. You can imagine that if a person has a disease progression of 18% vs 22%, that's not going to cause any meaningful difference. A disease might grow by only 10%, but if it's at a sensitive location, such as intracranial, then it could lead to some symptoms. Now let's talk about the early cancer trial setting. Of course, it's not feasible to go through the definition of each and every endpoint here, so again, if you want to have a more comprehensive understanding, I refer you back to that publication where all these endpoints are defined. Another way of defining endpoints is that there can be response-based endpoints, such as the objective response, complete response, partial response, and pathologic complete response that we talked about, vs time-to-eventendpoints.This is important because they are measured and analyzed in a different statistical way. Time-to-event endpoints are any endpoints that are measured in terms of the time it takes for the event to happen. Let's spend some time talking about response rate because it's getting more and more frequently used in clinical trials and also as a basis for approval, but it's a very weak surrogate. There is no way to define success here. As I mentioned, this was not meant for approval or clinical use. In fact, we did a comprehensive study on the response rate of placebo in randomized controlled trials of cancer drugs. You'd expect that placebo would have a 0% response rate, but we were surprised to find that even placebo had a 1% response rate. Complete response rate was, of course, zero with placebo. When you put that in context with what we're approving nowadays, this is 1% response rate overall. For example, I'm showing this trial in renal cell carcinoma where interferon was compared with placebo. In this particular case, placebo had a higher response than the drug. In another example from desmoid tumors, placebo had an overall response rate of 20%. If you compare that with some of the drugs that we have approved on the basis of response rate, like a 12% response rate in the CheckMate 032 trial, a 15% response rate in the EZH-20221 trial, and a 70% response rate in KEYNOTE-224. These are not good enough response rates, but we're approving drugs on the basis of these very small response rates. Just relying on the response rate in a single-arm trial is very likely to give us false positives. We talked about progression-free survival in the last video, but I'd also like to mentionthat there are some specific occasions where progression-free survival absolutely cannot be relied on, such as in later-line therapy trials or in situations where the prognosis is so bad that survival events happen within a year. For example, if we're talking about second- or third-line cholangiocarcinoma, in pancreatic cancer trials, patients have a median survival of 6-8 months — and not even 6 monthsif we're talking about second or third line. In that situation, there is no sense to use progression-free survival because you can measure survival so quickly, and there is no point in having a drug that does not improve survival. When the prognosis is very short, especially for later-line therapy trials, progression-free survival cannot be used. For combination therapies, when we are combining drug A plus B vs drug A alone, of course if we combine two drugs, it will extend progression compared with one drug alone. For maintenance therapies, these are situations where we continue on a treatment for a long time, where the standard of care actually is to do no treatment. If you're giving an active drug instead of not giving a drug, of course you'll extend progression. Does that lead to improved survival outcomes and should we subject all of our patients for that extended duration of treatment? In these situations, progression-free survival cannot be used. Let's spend some time on the adjuvant setting as well. In the adjuvant setting, I find it even trickier to rely on a surrogate endpoint, such as disease-free survival, as opposed to overall survival. In the adjuvant setting, by definition, we're treating all the patients, some of whom may not need treatment and some of whom may not benefit from treatment, but 100% of the patients will get toxicities. There are 67% of patients who did not relapse even if they only received placebo. We are benefitting only that small margin of patients, that 11% of patients who benefited from getting the drug. Again, in this situation, we should also ask whether the patients who received placebo in this trial actually received the drug when they relapsed and how it affected overall survival. We had this publication where we advocate to use the approach of three E's — evidence, ethics, and economics — to decide whether or not treating all the patients upfront on the basis of disease-free survival or surrogate endpoints is better than treating only the patients who relapse at the time of their relapse. In the next video, we'll continue discussing some additional considerations about surrogate endpoints.

Lining the shelves of American supermarkets are food products with chemicals linked to health concerns. Companies don't have to tell the FDA about those decisions, and they don't have to list all ingredients on their product labels. Instead, companies can use broad terms such as “artificial flavors.” In 1958, Congress mandated that before additives could be used in foods manufacturers had to prove they were safe and get FDA approval. As conceived, GRAS promised regulatory relief for standard ingredients like salt, sugar, vinegar, and baking powder. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to close or tighten the GRAS loophole. He has railed about the risks of food additives for years and has said he wants to end "the mass poisoning of American children." Whether changes come from the FDA or the food companies, it's clear Americans are becoming more concerned about what they're buying. This article was reprinted from khn.org, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF - the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn how experts are advancing benzodiazepine analysis and detection using insights from the lab. News-Medical.Net provides this medical information service in accordance with these terms and conditions. Please note that medical information found on this website is designed to support, not to replace the relationship between patient and physician/doctor and the medical advice they may provide. Hi, I'm Azthena, you can trust me to find commercial scientific answers from News-Medical.net. Registered members can chat with Azthena, request quotations, download pdf's, brochures and subscribe to our related newsletter content. A few things you need to know before we start. While we only use edited and approved content for Azthena answers, it may on occasions provide incorrect responses. Please confirm any data provided with the related suppliers or authors. Your questions, but not your email details will be shared with OpenAI and retained for 30 days in accordance with their privacy principles. Please do not ask questions that use sensitive or confidential information.

Medical cold chain units are essential for maintaining the safety and efficacy of vaccinations. These units are intended to provide continuous and reliable performance, but like any other piece of integral equipment, they require regular maintenance to function properly. With the right care and attention, you can keep your unit running efficiently while also extending its lifespan. To help you get the most out of your investment, this article presents five practical tips that can make a real difference. Dust accumulation can gradually affect your unit's efficiency and performance. If left unchecked, it can block vents, reduce cooling effectiveness, and even lead to overheating or corrosion. Making a habit of checking and cleaning for dust at least once a week helps keep your unit running at peak performance while minimizing unnecessary strain on its components. Consistent cleaning also improves energy efficiency, which can lead to lower operational costs over time. While condensation is a normal part of refrigeration, allowing excess water to accumulate in your fridge unit can lead to long-term damage. Using the drainage plug to remove excess water is a simple yet effective step with significant benefits. This routine not only helps maintain a clean and hygienic environment but also safeguards the unit's internal mechanisms from potential water damage. The condenser fan plays a crucial role in keeping your unit's cooling system running efficiently, ensuring that stored products remain at a stable and safe temperature. To prevent these issues, regularly check the fan area for dust or debris and make sure nothing is blocking airflow. Proper ventilation is essential for keeping your unit running efficiently and in good condition. Regularly checking and cleaning these components is a simple yet effective way to maintain optimal performance and extend your unit's lifespan. Even with regular cleaning, professional maintenance is key to ensuring your unit's longevity. Over time, components can experience wear and tear that may not be immediately noticeable. Scheduling an annual inspection with a qualified technician allows for a thorough assessment, ensuring all systems are functioning correctly and addressing minor issues before they turn into major problems. Preventative maintenance not only protects your investment but also improves operational efficiency. Catching potential issues early helps prevent unexpected breakdowns that could disrupt workflows and lead to costly repairs. This proactive approach keeps your unit running reliably year-round while extending its lifespan. By incorporating these five simple tips into your routine, you can significantly extend the lifespan of your B Medical Systems unit. Regular cleaning and ongoing minor maintenance help prevent major issues before they arise. Not only does this reduce the risk of costly repairs, but it also ensures your unit operates reliably—safeguarding the integrity of its valuable contents. Across the 3 major business portfolios of Medical Refrigeration, Blood Management Solutions, and Vaccine Cold Chain, the company currently offers 100+ models. All products have integrated 24/7 temperature monitoring capabilities that further ensure that these products offer the highest level of safety and reliability. Throughout its over 40 years of experience, the company has created innovative solutions to store and transport pharmaceuticals, blood components, laboratory specimens, vaccines, etc across the world safely and reliably. Its commitment to supporting health institutions, governments, and NGOs has not only saved innumerable lives but helped entire communities develop and prosper. The company's products are essential to hospitals, health centers, blood banks, laboratories, and more, as their great reliability and efficiency ensure that any biological requiring cold storage can indeed be stored safely at its intended temperature. As modern medicine becomes more complex and very often requires the use of unstable compounds or produces thermosensitive solutions, B Medical Systems medical cold chain equipment provides the peace of mind scientists and healthcare workers need in their day-to-day life. Moreover, as the established market leader in the Vaccine Cold Chain for the past 40 years, B Medical Systems has provided equipment to support its partners in vaccinating more than 350 million children in developing countries. Through its long-lasting relationships with global humanitarian organisations such as UNICEF, the WHO, Gavi, Health Ministries, etc., B Medical Systems has installed more than five hundred thousand units across 140+ countries across the world for safely storing and transporting vaccines, medicines, blood and other samples. During the COVID-19 pandemic, B Medical Systems has been actively supporting governments worldwide in the formation of their vaccine responses, by supporting the establishment of a reliable and versatile vaccine cold chain able to meet any storage temperature requirement. B Medical Systems is also one of the first few companies in the world to receive EU MDR certification for its active refrigeration product lines across medical refrigeration and blood management business lines. B Medical Systems is also one of the few companies in the world to have an end-to-end refrigeration solution certified by EU MDR, US FDA and WHO PQS. Sponsored Content Policy: News-Medical.net publishes articles and related content that may be derived from sources where we have existing commercial relationships, provided such content adds value to the core editorial ethos of News-Medical.Net which is to educate and inform site visitors interested in medical research, science, medical devices and treatments. Please use one of the following formats to cite this article in your essay, paper or report: Top 5 tips for extending the life of your medical cold chain units. "Top 5 tips for extending the life of your medical cold chain units". "Top 5 tips for extending the life of your medical cold chain units". Top 5 tips for extending the life of your medical cold chain units. Cold Storage Environments for the Most Thermosensitive Biological Samples Maintaining viability of cell and gene therapy products with ultra-low freezers Medical Contact Shock Freezers for the Simple Act of Freezing Blood Plasma News-Medical.Net provides this medical information service in accordance with these terms and conditions. Please note that medical information found on this website is designed to support, not to replace the relationship between patient and physician/doctor and the medical advice they may provide. Hi, I'm Azthena, you can trust me to find commercial scientific answers from News-Medical.net. Registered members can chat with Azthena, request quotations, download pdf's, brochures and subscribe to our related newsletter content. A few things you need to know before we start. While we only use edited and approved content for Azthena answers, it may on occasions provide incorrect responses. Please confirm any data provided with the related suppliers or authors. 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While many nurses work set schedules with occasional overtime, Martha Mendez, a registered nurse (RN) in El Centro, California, prefers a more flexible approach to patient care. It's the same way an Uber driver decides when they want to turn on their app and drive clients. “When I learned about the logistics of [gig work], it really caught my attention, and I gave it a shot.” Nurses can register with platforms like Float Health, CareRev, ShiftMed, and Clipboard Health to choose shifts that fit their schedules. The model, also known as per diem or float nursing, has been hailed as a potential solution to staffing shortages, allowing health systems to fill short-term staffing gaps and meet immediate patient needs. “Every state has a nursing shortage…and that shortage is projected to increase,” said Katie Jett, DNP, RN, MSN, dean of the School of Nursing at Ponce Health Sciences University in St. Louis. “A lot of nurses don't want to work 12-hour shifts and mandatory overtime… [Gig work allows nurses] to book around their schedules or come in for a 4-hour shift, and that is very enticing.” The gig model, once limited to rideshare drivers and food deliveries, has entered healthcare. Mendez started picking up shifts through Float Health in 2022. She'd worked in hospital emergency rooms, medical-surgical units, and correctional facilities for more than a decade and loved being at the bedside but felt that working conditions, including mandatory overtime, were “unacceptable.” At first, Mendez only picked up one or two shifts per month doing at-home infusions for patients and continued to work in her full-time nursing role. The option for a flexible schedule, one-on-one patient care, and higher pay led her to leave that staff role and make the switch to per diem nursing. “But one of the biggest drivers is not money; it's being able to have the peace of mind that I have the balance to care for my family, not only financially, but to be there for them and offer the same care that I offer to others.” The latest data show that 33% of nurses wanted to pick up shifts on an as-needed basis and cited the ability to work partial shifts and pick up additional work at different facilities as key areas of career interest. The recognition that gig platforms account for a growing part of the healthcare workforce has led some health systems, including St. Louis-based Mercy Health, to create their own gig work platform. In 2022, Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Missouri, launched Mercy Works on Demand, a cloud-based platform that enables nurses to pick up shifts. Since going live, the hospital has seen an increase in the number of shifts picked up, resulting in decreased costs and safe patient care, according to Jodi Pahl, RN-BC, DNP, the system chief nursing officer of Workforce, Outcomes, and Experience of Care at Bon Secours Mercy Health. Pahl points to the advantages of an internal model, citing consistent care from nurses trained within the organization and aligned with its culture and standards, adding, “These nurses are more engaged, adaptable, and cost-effective than gig workers, avoiding the high fees and variability associated with external staffing.” Internal float pools also serve as a retention pipeline for future permanent hires. The expanding gig work in healthcare has raised some concerns. A recent report from the Roosevelt Institute, New York City, called the model a “Wall Street takeover of US healthcare infrastructure” and warned that gig nursing platforms offer lower rates, fail to guarantee available shifts or offer certainty about the nature of the work, and fail to account for worker safety and patient well-being. There is also some debate about the fees paid to RNs who work on a per diem basis. The average rate for RNs picking up shifts through gig work apps is $59 per hour, according to the Roosevelt Institute report (compared with a median wage of $41.38 per hour), according to nurse.org. However, some apps have a bid-for-gigs model that allows health systems to hire nurses willing to work for the lowest rates. In addition, nurses working as independent contractors may lack protections like sick leave and unemployment insurance. Jodi Helmer is a freelance journalist who writes about health and wellness for Fortune, AARP, WebMD, Fitbit, and GE HealthCare.

A recent study conducted by researchers from Universidad San Francisco de Quito and Johns Hopkins University has revealed critical insights into the mental health of healthcare providers in Ecuador during the COVID-19 pandemic. Published in journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, this research examines the balance between compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress among healthcare professionals working in public institutions across Ecuador, a low-and middle-income country. The study surveyed 2,873 healthcare providers from 111 public institutions across 23 provinces in Ecuador between February and July 2022. Using the Professional Quality of Life Scale Version-5 (ProQOL V5), researchers assessed self-reported levels of compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress. Key findings include high compassion satisfaction (84.9%), moderate burnout (57.1%, higher in the Amazon), and moderate secondary traumatic stress (59.6%), that correlated with burnout levels. The study also highlighted significant differences based on gender, professional roles, and geographic regions. Male healthcare providers exhibited slightly higher burnout levels than their female counterparts, while physicians reported the highest burnout rates compared to other professions such as nurses and first responders. These findings underscore the urgent need for targeted mental health policies and interventions to support healthcare providers in low- and middle-income countries like Ecuador. Despite high levels of compassion satisfaction, many professionals are grappling with moderate burnout and secondary traumatic stress, which can impact both their well-being and the quality of care they provide." The research calls for additional studies to explore factors contributing to burnout in resource-constrained settings and emphasizes the importance of developing mental health legislation tailored to the needs of healthcare providers in Ecuador and similar countries. Society for Disaster Medicine and Public Health, Inc. Characterizing Mental Health in an LMIC Context: Measuring Compassion Satisfaction, Burnout, and Secondary Traumatic Stress Among Health Care Providers in Ecuador During COVID-19 with the ProQOL V5 Questionnaire. Learn how experts are advancing benzodiazepine analysis and detection using insights from the lab. News-Medical.Net provides this medical information service in accordance with these terms and conditions. Please note that medical information found on this website is designed to support, not to replace the relationship between patient and physician/doctor and the medical advice they may provide. Hi, I'm Azthena, you can trust me to find commercial scientific answers from News-Medical.net. Registered members can chat with Azthena, request quotations, download pdf's, brochures and subscribe to our related newsletter content. A few things you need to know before we start. While we only use edited and approved content for Azthena answers, it may on occasions provide incorrect responses. Please confirm any data provided with the related suppliers or authors. Your questions, but not your email details will be shared with OpenAI and retained for 30 days in accordance with their privacy principles. Please do not ask questions that use sensitive or confidential information.