Category: Health

As Don Urbanek lay in a hospital bed, his pain from terminal cancer eased by medication, he expressed a wish: to visit his son’s ranch in Oklahoma before dying.
“We will do whatever we can” to make that happen, nurse practitioner Kathleen Murphy-Ende said, as a social worker stood nearby.
The delicate moment seemed typical for hospice, the medical specialty that focuses on the end of life. But Urbanek wasn’t a hospice patient. He was receiving palliative care, a related but different service provided in a new unit at UW Hospital.

WHEN THE Pakistan secret police physically assaulted Dr. Amna Buttar on the streets of Islamabad during a protest march last spring, presumably they wanted to scare her. That worked.

….The thugs from Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s secret police presumably also thought their attack might cause Buttar to rethink her role as an activist and critic of the Musharraf regime.
That didn’t work. In fact, the opposite has happened.

Summer Boyd says that mold problems in Ingraham Hall on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus are so bad that she has to work at home.

Numerous other workers in the 1960s-era building say they have been plagued with breathing difficulties, burning throats, itchy eyes and coughs, and that UW officials have been slow to solve the problem.

….University officials met with the workers Wednesday and say they have been trying to solve the problems. But they concede that fixes have not worked.

Four Dane County groups were cited for their work to improve safety during the first “BeSafe Awards” luncheon held Tuesday at the Inn on the Park.

….Dr. Frank Byrne of St. Mary’s Hospital, Margaret Van Bree of UW Hospitals and Clinics, and Jim Woodward of Meriter Hospital received the award for collaboration for their efforts to improve patient safety conditions at their hospitals.

MADISON, Wis. — What if your doctor could swipe a wand over your neck and reveal whether you have hidden heart disease?

That is now possible in places other than the sickbay of the starship Enterprise.

Miniature ultrasound machines are starting to make their way into ordinary doctors’ offices, where they may someday be as common as stethoscopes and EKGs. A pocket-sized one weighing less than 2 pounds hit the market last week.

For the second year in a row, the organ transplant program at UW Hospital and Clinics ranks first in the nation for numbers of kidney transplants and combination kidney-pancreas transplants performed.

According to figures compiled by the United Network of Organ Sharing, UW surgeons transplanted 346 kidneys in calendar year 2006 — 18 more than the University of Alabama-Birmingham, the second-place center — and 36 simultaneous kidney-pancreases.

The national rankings are just one of several milestones UW’s transplant program expects to hit this year. Within the next month, Dr. Hans Sollinger, chairman of the organ transplantation program, said the program will perform its 1,000th simultaneous kidney-pancreas transplant, a national record.

Organ donor transplants have come a long way in the last few years, but nationally nearly 100,000 people remain on the waiting list.

The UW Health Transplant Program is considered the best kidney and pancreas transplant facility in the nation. This afternoon the hospital thanked the heroes who make it all possible.

In the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games, snowboarder Chris Klug achieved his life-long dream, winning an Olympic medal. But, it nearly didn’t happen. In July of 2000 he received a liver transplant after waiting on the list for 6 years.

The young man who police say put the University of Wisconsin campus in turmoil Tuesday with a series of phone calls suffers from mental problems which may well stem from his horribly troubled childhood and have left him threatening suicide in the past. He was also expected to be a witness for the prosecution in an upcoming murder trial.

Court records for several cases involving Jesse Alton Miller, 19, show that he was the subject of juvenile court interventions almost from his birth, that he was sexually and emotionally abused by his parents, that he was rejected time and again by families he was residing with after being taken from his parents, and that he responded to all of that by committing numerous criminal acts beginning at the age of 9 in Milwaukee.

A top London hospital flew in an expert from America to explain to doctors the importance of washing their hands.

It came after fears that senior medics at University College Hospital were not taking hygiene seriously.

Specialist infection nurses invited Dennis Maki, from the University of Wisconsin, to try to force senior staff to pay more attention to superbugs.

UW Hospital became the first hospital in Madison on Monday to offer free high-speed wireless Internet access for patients and visitors to use during their stays.

Lisa Brunette, UW Hospital media relations director, said this advance in technology is becoming a national trend, and is important for a large medical research center.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s new Institute for Clinical and Translational Research will get $41 million over five years from the National Institutes of Health to improve the way biomedical and health sciences discoveries make their way into clinical trials, hospitals and doctors’ offices.

Madison psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Eimermann died of heart disease while swimming in Devil’s Lake during a triathlon Saturday, according to Sauk County coroner Betty Hinze.

“He died of atherosclerotic disease,” Hinze said today. “The plaque in the arteries built up to a point where his system shut down.”