Closer Look
Hospital design gets an assist from virtual reality
Courtesy XRLab Berkeley
When you think of a hospital, do harsh lights, bare walls, and windows facing parking lots come to mind? Now imagine that environment through the eyes of a child. To improve not just the experience but how young patients respond to care in hospitals, groups at UCSF Benioff Children's and Boston Children's, among others, are exploring ways to fold young patients' feedback into hospital design, like the color of walls and the placement of windows, art, and couches.
"Neuroarchitecture" isn't new, STAT's Mohana Ravindranath reminds us, but Haripriya Sathyanarayanan, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate, is using a new tool to get a child's perspective: virtual reality to measure how comfortable 30 pediatric patients might be in differently designed hospital rooms. "Seeing the outside world is really nice, because a lot of times we're not allowed to leave our room or if we can it's just to our floor," high school student and study participant Ariela Rubens said. Read more.
cardiovascular health
One size does not fit all for blood pressure readings, study says
Blood pressure readings are a crucial part of health care, establishing risk for cardiovascular disease. Automated devices help people with hypertension track their progress at home, too. We're all familiar with that whoosh of an automated blood pressure reader, but how many of us have ever seen anything but one size cuff wrapped around our upper arms? Or ever had our arms measured?
A new study in JAMA Internal Medicine that tested cuffs in different sizes (too small, just right, too big) in 195 people with hypertension found strikingly inaccurate readings, depending on arm size. The bigger the cuff, the bigger the error, they report, and problems occurred not just among patients with obesity, but also those with relatively smaller arms. "With misdiagnosis to this degree comes additional, likely unnecessary, clinical testing (laboratory and imaging) and treatment, leading to increased cost, psychosocial harm, and risk for adverse events," they conclude.
addiction
Health care workers face higher risk of fatal overdoses
Amid the ongoing opioid overdose epidemic, health care workers may not come to mind as high risk. Their profile doesn't match trends in substance use disorder: Women are well-represented, particularly among nurses. They're well-educated and they have higher income. But new research in the Annals of Internal Medicine found a higher risk of fatal overdoses among registered nurses, health care support workers, and social or behavioral health workers than in the general population.
The pre-pandemic study, which followed about 176,000 health care workers, did not find an increased risk of overdose deaths in physicians. The researchers note that registered nurses, social or behavioral health workers, and health care support workers may be at greater risk because they prescribe or administer medicines, experience job stress, and undertake physically strenuous tasks that could cause musculoskeletal injury resulting in opioid dependency.
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