Indianapolis Recorder, Indianapolis, Marion County, 16 December 2005 — Page 18

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THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2005

WINTER Continued from Cl • Socialize - Depression is more common in the winter months, andbad weather can mean social isolation for many seniors. Make efforts to spend time with family, friends and neighbors, and when weather makes visiting difficult, pick up the phone for a chat. This article was written by Dr. Ellen W. Miller, executive director of the University of Indianapolis Center for Aging d Community.

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A study in the December issue of Academic Medicine asks: what happens when ahospital patient’s physician goes off duty and another physician assumes responsibility for the patient? The answer: An efficient and safe patient handoff often does not occur, probably because physicians, unlike air traffic controllers and others who perform vital handoffs, do not receive adequate training in how to communicate during these transfers of responsibility and across different information systems. The solution: Teach physicians the handoff process using a model based on principles of adult learning, effective feedback and clinical experience.

Poor communication in medical practice is one of the most common causes of medical errors, according to the study’s senior author, Richard M. Frankel, Ph.D., professor of medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine, and a research scientist at the Health Services Research and Development Center on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice, Richard L. Roudebush Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the Regenstrief Institute Inc. “Our study poses two veiy basic questions. First we asked: ‘Can we afford to spend the time, effort, and dollars involved in additional training of physicians? And then we asked: Can we afford not to?’” said Dr. Frankel. A precise patient handoff from one

physician to the next is critical to patient safety and care, said Dr. Frankel, a medical sociologist who studies physician communication. “The safest method of transferring responsibility for a patient is a face-to-face handoff in which the physician going off duty talks directly with the physician coming on duty,” Dr. Frankel said. “Computerized medical records can facilitate face-to-face handoffs,” he said, adding, “Body language and other crucial factors are lost when the handoff is done over the phone and a written handoff maybe difficult to read - doctors have notoriously poor penmanship - errors especially in numbers or decimal places are easy to make, and written notes are open to misinterpretation or misplacement.”

Could a house plan! clean The air?

(HealthDay News) — Want a great, green way to clean the air in your house? A new study by a California teenager suggests that a not-so-usual suspect - the English ivy plant - might be just the ticket. Ryan Kim, the son of an allergy researcher, found that an English ivy plant does a significant job of cleansing the air of mold particles and other nasty particulates, including canine fecal matter. “This may be a better alternative, and more cost-effective” than an electronic air purifier, said study co-author Hilary Spyers-Duran, a nurse practitioner and investigator at West Coast Clinical Trials in Long Beach, Calif. But an indoor-pollution specialist is skeptical of the plant-as-air-cleaner approach. He suggested that concerned residents try an old-fashioned method: ridding the house beforehand of contaminants that make the air dirty. Some house plants, including English ivy, have been touted for their air-cleaning properties. But it hasn’t been entirely clear how effectively they work, said Spyers-Duran, who wrote the paper with Kim, the son of her company’s CEO, Dr. Kenneth

Kim. The younger Kim put moldy bread and dogfeces in individual containers and measured how many particles spread into the air. Then he put an English ivy plant into the containers to see what happened, and then repeated the experiment. The study findings were released last week at the annual meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology in Anaheim, Calif. According to the study, the plant reduced airborne particles of fecal matter by an average of more than 94 percent over 12 hours. The level of mold in the air went down by 78.5 percent. How does a plant manage to clean the air? “Aerosolized proteins are actually absorbed through the roots and soil of the plant,” Spyers-Duran explained. So should health-conscious Americans rush out and buy an English ivy plant? There are a few caveats, experts said. For one thing, English ivy is toxic and shouldn’t be placed near small children or pets. Also, the study only examined what the plant does in containers, not in entire rooms.

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