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Chaplains Play Unique Role in Advance Care Planning

Ninety percent of 585 of board-certified healthcare chaplains said advance care planning is important to their work, 70% regularly help patients complete paperwork after discussions, 90% facilitate discussions with patients about their preferences, and 45% reported they were not consistently included in team discussions on decision-making.

Framework for Developing Health Research Ethics Competencies

Researchers were surprised that despite ongoing efforts to develop research ethics programs over many years in the United States and internationally, there was no published competency framework to follow, nor was there a standard approach to creating competencies in this context. This, despite the fact competencies have been used for education in business, medicine, and elsewhere for decades.

Informed Consent, Payment Are Ethical Concerns with Egg Donation

A survey of current and former egg donors revealed some possible gaps when it comes to communicating potential long-term risks.

Complicated Ethics of Adolescent Children Self-Consenting for Vaccines

Parental rights issues often are asserted, but at the same time, society has a stake in protecting children from harm, including medical neglect.

The Evolving Ethics of Researching Illegal Substances

Interest in clinical research on cannabis and psilocybin is soaring. However, current barriers to studying these controlled substances raise ethical questions.

C. auris Can Be Stopped, but Not Easily

A superbug that can become pan-resistant to fungal drugs, Candida auris first was reported in the United States in 2013 and continues to spread and cause hospital outbreaks.

Reinfection: COVID-19 Vaccine Twice as Effective as Antibodies

COVID-19 vaccination is more than twice as protective as circulating antibodies in people who had a prior infection with SARS-CoV-2, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.

Reducing Immediate-Use Steam Sterilization

Once called “flash sterilization,” the practice of quickly sterilizing a surgical instrument and returning it to the sterile field now is called immediate-use steam sterilization (IUSS). Regardless of the name, it generally has been been discouraged if used as a substitute for lack of sufficient supplies or to save time for a non-emergency reason.

IP Cuts SSIs by 55%, Saves a Net $805,000

A hospital saved a tidy sum and left 10 patients much happier — those who did not have surgical site infections (SSIs), as predicted by the SSI rate prior to an intervention that revamped the patient preparation protocol.

CDC: Resistance Emerging to Last-Line Carbapenem Drugs

Carbapenems are a last-line antibiotic, one of the final weapons in the formulary against multidrug-resistant bacteria. But the ever-evolving bugs are starting to solve this drug class and have found an ingenious way to do it — genetic transfer of resistant properties to another Gram-negative bacterium.