Two Medical Center studies attract national notice
Published on Monday, June 17, 2024
By: Gary Pettus, gpettus@umc.edu
Medical Center faculty and staff often are recognized regionally, nationally and internationally for their academic or medical achievements. These accolades place UMMC among health science centers worldwide.
CICU staff publishes study in clinical practice journal
A study coauthored by members of the cardiovascular intensive care unit (CICU) at the University of Mississippi Medical Center was published this month in the professional journal of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses.
The study details a three-part program of simulation training designed to improved clinicians’ ability to recognize clinical signs that would call for an emergency sternotomy (surgical incision through the breastbone) for a postoperative cardiac surgery patient; the program’s aim is also to clarify the roles of clinicians during the procedure.
“Simulation Training for Emergency Sternotomy in the Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit,” published in the AACN journal, Critical Care Nurse, also relates the program’s impact based on surveys of those participating.
The coauthors are Dr. Athanasios Tsiouris, assistant professor of surgery-cardiothoracic; Dr. Adam Protos, assistant professor of surgery-cardiothoracic and division chief of cardiac surgery; Victoria Keys, RN; Deanna Chambers, RN; Dr. Ashok Kumar Coimbatore Jeyakumar, assistant professor of surgery-cardiothoracic; and Dr. Jay Shake, professor of surgery-cardiothoracic.
“These events are fortunately rare, but when they do occur, staff members need to be familiar with the surgical instruments and techniques needed,” Tsiouris said in an AACN news release about the study. “Ongoing education and simulation training allow them to rehearse these situations as a team and have hands-on experience prior to a real-life patient emergency.”
The simulations led to “quality improvement in the ICU and streamlining of established protocols.”
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Research focuses on barriers to stages of TB care in India
Dr. Tulip Jhaveri, assistant professor of infectious diseases at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, is the lead author of the study, “Barriers to Engagement in the Care Cascade for Tuberculosis Disease in India: A Systematic Review of Quantitative Studies,” which was published in PLOS Medicine.
India has the highest tuberculosis (TB) incidence, accounting for about a quarter of people with TB disease and nearly a third of TB deaths globally. Many people with TB do not navigate the entire care cascade, or stages of care needed to receive treatment and achieve an optimal long-term outcome. The aim of this systematic review was to extract information on risk factors for unfavorable outcomes for each care cascade gap, as well as reasons reported by people with TB who experienced unfavorable outcomes.
Understanding why losses of people with TB disease occur across the care cascade is crucial to target additional services to people with higher risk of poor outcomes and develop multicomponent interventions to address the diverse challenges faced by people with TB, Jhaveri said.
Other than UMMC, health organizations represented in the study include Tufts University School of Medicine, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School and Beth Deaconess Medical Center in Boston; the Centre for Operational Research and the Southeast Asia Office of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease in Paris and New Delhi, India, respectively; the National Tuberculosis Institute in Bengaluru, India; Yenepoya Medical College in Mangalore, India, and ICMR-National Institute of Epidemiology in Chennai, India.