Tuesday | April 18, 2023

Healthcare starts with you. This is your beat.

Hey-O Nursing Beat Friends!

I’m coming in hot with this week’s Two for Tuesday medical facts! So let’s get into it! 

🦠25 million new cells are created within the human body every second. (To put that into perspective, that’s a little less than the entire population of Canada regenerated every 60 seconds!)

🩸A single drop of blood contains 25 million cells. (Multiply that by the total number of blood cells in circulation, around 30 to 40 trillion; well, it comes out to about one sextillion [10²¹] blood cells in circulation at any given time. 

…and now my brain hurts from doing the math. 

Big love and even better health,

Kel M.

Managing Editor of TNB

MORNING BRIEF 🍳 ☕️

Tiffany Dover Is Alive — and Finally Speaking Up

If you’ve never heard the podcast, Tiffany Dover Is Dead, now is the perfect time to listen to what happened when a Tennessee nurse fainted after receiving her Covid vaccine during a Facebook Live stream in December 2020. NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny tells how Tiffany Dover, an RN at CHI Memorial Hospital Chattanooga, became the epicenter of anti-vaccine conspiracy propaganda despite her hospital PR team’s misguided attempts to show that she was alive. But Zadrozny never spoke to Dover because the hospital told Dover not to speak to anyone or post on social media. 

Dover now regrets not speaking up, as her life was turned inside out by a conspiracy theory that persists to this day. Dover reached out to Zadrozny to reclaim her life, and the new article reveals just how hellish her journey as an unwilling anti-vaccine symbol has been.

Iowa Nurse Wins Unemployment Benefits After Patient Assault

It took five police officers to control a violent patient holding a hammer who showed up bleeding at Regional Health Services of Howard County in Iowa on September 19, 2022. After the officers finally subdued him and handcuffed him to a hospital bed, RN Lori Martinek explained that handcuffing him to the bed frame wasn’t safe, so he was placed in a four-point restraint—yet he still managed to kick Martinek in the stomach when she tried to insert a catheter. 

Martinek was fired the next day for allegedly violating the hospital’s policy on patient restraints. But when she applied for unemployment benefits, the hospital challenged her application. An Iowa judge has sided with Martinek after watching a video of the incident and noting that the hospital hadn’t provided adequate evidence of Martinek’s alleged misconduct. In addition, the judge called Martinek’s professionalism during the incident “exemplary.” 

Ohio Nurse Designed Video Game to Help Kids’ Pre-Op Procedures

Getting surgery as a child is scary enough. Still, the anxiety can go up even further when kids have to correctly follow directions for pre-op procedures, such as putting on their anesthesia mask correctly. But Cincinnati Children’s nurse practitioner Abby Hess, DNP, has a fix for that. Hess designed a video game called EZ Induction that helps pediatric patients control their breathing and ease their anxiety when it’s time to fall asleep for surgery.

The gaming app shows kids cartoon animals that the children can move around by breathing into their mask—the game controller. Breathing in and out helps them win various challenges with the animals. Hess collaborated with the Cincinnati Children’s Innovation Ventures team and the Ohio Third Frontier Technology Validation and Start-up Fund to create and test the app. 

COMMUNITY PICKS 🌼 

As nurses, we know that each shift will bring its own set of difficulties. So if you need a little bump in self-confidence after a shift that was nothing short of a train wreck, check out the book, “Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness” by Steve Magness. 

TECH TUESDAY with NURSE MANNY 🤖

Tools to Improve Patient Satisfaction 

With ED and hospital overcrowding affecting many medical centers in the US, the added patient confusion regarding the acute hospitalization process leads to poor patient satisfaction. Tech products best serve patients and clinical staff when they can improve or ease current processes instead of creating new workflows. Vital, with their suite of patient experience and clinical staff communication tools powered by AI with consumer-grade user interface design, might be the tools to aid in improving these issues. 

Being an emergency nurse, I found their ERAdvisor software particularly interesting as it allows the patient to self check-in, get educated, and be updated on their ED visit and expectations. With EHR implementation guided by nurses and other clinicians, tools like these can give patients a reasonable sense of control, ease workflows for staff and ultimately ease workflows for staff. Check out their demo here.

DAILY DIVERSION 💊

Everybody poops, but some people get paid to poop. To learn more about becoming a stool donor in the fight against diseases like C. difficile, check out the Good Nature program. 

🤯 ONE BIG NUMBER

Thanks for reading! 🤓