Long wait over for dialysis unit

9:30am Saturday 16th June 2012 in News

A LONG-awaited kidney dialysis unit has been officially opened to serve patients in the north of the county.

A ribbon was cut at the Horton General Hospital’s new dialysis unit yesterday by hospital chief executive Sir Jonathan Michael and Banbury MP Tony Baldry.

The machines at the new unit, staffed by two new nurses, can treat 21 patients a day and will serve patients from Chipping Norton to Brackley who need dialysis three days a week.

Kidney patients in the Bicester area will continue to get treatment in Oxford.

Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust bosses said the unit could expand if there was a surge in demand.

Chris Heath said her late husband Eric would have loved to have seen the new unit.

Mr Heath, a former Cherwell District Council leader, used to have to travel to the Churchill three times a week for dialysis but sadly died just before Christmas.

Mrs Heath, from Bloxham, gave around £900 donated at her husband’s funeral to the new unit.

She said: “He was so desperate for the new unit to be opened.

“Going to Oxford meant having dialysis all in all was a ten-hour process.

“He would have loved to see it. I did shed a few tears today but that was the only sad part of the day.”

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Long wait over for dialysis unit

9:30am Saturday 16th June 2012 in Bicester

A LONG-awaited kidney dialysis unit has been officially opened to serve patients in the north of the county.

A ribbon was cut at the Horton General Hospital’s new dialysis unit yesterday by hospital chief executive Sir Jonathan Michael and Banbury MP Tony Baldry.

The machines at the new unit, staffed by two new nurses, can treat 21 patients a day and will serve patients from Chipping Norton to Brackley who need dialysis three days a week.

Kidney patients in the Bicester area will continue to get treatment in Oxford.

Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust bosses said the unit could expand if there was a surge in demand.

Chris Heath said her late husband Eric would have loved to have seen the new unit.

Mr Heath, a former Cherwell District Council leader, used to have to travel to the Churchill three times a week for dialysis but sadly died just before Christmas.

Mrs Heath, from Bloxham, gave around £900 donated at her husband’s funeral to the new unit.

She said: “He was so desperate for the new unit to be opened.

“Going to Oxford meant having dialysis all in all was a ten-hour process.

“He would have loved to see it. I did shed a few tears today but that was the only sad part of the day.”

Comment now! Register or sign in below.

Or

...

WALTHAM, Mass.—It is a widely accepted myth that medicine requires complex, highly specialized information-technology (IT) systems. This myth continues to justify soaring IT costs, burdensome physician workloads, and stagnation in innovation — while doctors become increasingly bound to documentation and communication products that are functionally decades behind those they use in their “civilian” life.

Even as consumer IT — word-processing programs, search engines, social networks, e-mail systems, mobile phones and apps, music players, gaming platforms — has become deeply integrated into the fabric of modern life, physicians find themselves locked into pre–Internet-era electronic health records (EHRs) that aspire to provide complete and specialized environments for diverse tasks. The federal push for health IT, spearheaded by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), establishes an information backbone for accountable care, patient safety, and health care reform. But we now need to take the next step: fitting EHRs into a dynamic, state-of-the-art, rapidly evolving information infrastructure — rather than jamming all health care processes and workflows into constrained EHR operating environments.

We believe that EHR vendors propagate the myth that health IT is qualitatively different from industrial and consumer products in order to protect their prices and market share and block new entrants. In reality, diverse functionality needn't reside within single EHR systems, and there's a clear path toward better, safer, cheaper, and nimbler tools for managing health care's complex tasks.

Early health IT offerings were cutting-edge, but contemporary EHRs distinctly lag behind systems used in other fields. In 1966, members of Octo Barnett's laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital invented a highly efficient programming language for the earliest EHRs; the Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System (MUMPS) partitioned precious computer memory so parsimoniously that with only 16 kilobytes, the earliest personal computers could run an EHR supporting multiple users. But nearly a half-century later, most EHR vendors not only have failed to innovate but don't even embrace existing modular architectures with interfaces that allow extension of product capabilities, innovative uses of data, and interoperation with other software.

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NEW YORK—Fresenius Medical Care (FMC) could face scrutiny from U.S. regulators for failing to alert dialysis clinics of risks linked to one of the drugs sold by the company.

In its online edition, the paper cites a U.S. Food and Drug Administration official as saying he was "troubled" that FMC only warned its own clinics of a link between its GranuFlo drug for dialysis patients and a higher risk of deadly cardiac arrest during the drug cleansing procedure.

FMC operates about a third of all U.S. dialysis centers for patients with kidney failure, but it also supplies dialysis machines and drugs to rival clinic operators there and in Europe.

The company, which makes almost two thirds of its revenues in North America, is controlled by German healthcare conglomerate Fresenius SE & Co. KGaA.

In a Nov. 4 memo to FMC's U.S. doctors, the company said statistics point to doctors giving too much GranuFlo to some patients, triggering cardiac arrest, the newspaper said.

"In light of these troubling findings," doctors should dose more carefully, according to the memo, which also said that "this issue needs to be addressed urgently".

Fresenius, did not alert non-FMC centers until late March, after the FDA anonymously received a copy of the internal memo and questioned the company about it, the Times reported.

The paper cited Steven Silverman, director of compliance for the FDA's medical devices division, as saying he was "troubled by the fact that Fresenius on its own initiative didn't notify its entire customer base of this particular concern".

The chief medical officer for FMC in North America, Franklin W. Maddux, told the paper the findings of the internal memo were too preliminary to warrant a publication.

A spokesman for FMC, which is based in Germany, told Reuters on Friday he would be able to comment later in the day.

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