UW Health and UnityPoint Health — Meriter are moving to make masks “encouraged” rather than required in many of its facilities. The hospital systems are now encouraging masks as most clinics and some spaces within hospitals. Masks are still required in locations deemed as “high risk” based on the patient population served.
As a clinical professor at the UW-Madison School of Nursing, (Gina) Bryan said she also sees many parts of the state struggle to attract psychiatric advanced practice nurse graduates, who go instead to Minnesota or Iowa where they can work independently. “Why would our students stay here and practice?” she said.
Bunmi Kumapayi, a UW Health nurse practitioner who has treated urologic conditions for more than 20 years, said the doctor she collaborates with allows her to work very independently. But for many newer advanced practice nurses around the state, that is not the case, she said.
He already was a rock star at running hospitals and had options, but agreed to become chief executive officer of the University of Wisconsin Hospital & Clinics (the predecessor to UW Health.) The mammoth hospital we see today on Highland Avenue opened five years after he arrived. Derzon navigated its evolution for 26 years before retiring in 2000.
Noted: University of Wisconsin-Madison political science and law professor Howard Schweber said if Kaul’s lawsuit is successful, the 20-week abortion law would go back into effect along with the waiting periods and mandatory ultrasound requirements.
Dr. Greg DeMuri, a pediatric infectious disease doctor at UW Health, also spoke in favor of eliminating the mandate, saying that “almost the entire population has some form of immunity to COVID, whether it’s the vaccine or natural infection.” The number of hospitalizations due to COVID-19 are now “very, very low,” he said, adding that complications are “very rare.”
A job working at Madison-based UW Health while attending nursing school at Madison College. Full-time benefits and salaries. Paid time-off to attend classes. Free college tuition, books and supplies.
That’s the offer on the table for those aspiring to earn a nursing degree through a recently announced, first-of-its-kind apprenticeship program in Wisconsin launching this fall. The program is designed specifically to address staffing shortages in Wisconsin that Rudy Jackson, UW Health’s chief nurse executive, said have reached “crisis levels.”
“The program began through grant funding from the Meriter Foundation and an NIH grant from UW-Madison,” Fire Department spokesperson Cynthia Schuster said. “Over the years, the program has grown to be an integrated part of the Madison Fire Department, and Mindy has been instrumental in that growth. Her contributions to the program have helped expand its services and will have a lasting impact on the program for years to come.”
UW Health and Madison Area Technical College are starting a nurse apprentice program to help diverse medical and nursing assistants get nursing degrees and become registered nurses.
The health system says the four-year program is designed to encourage a diverse group of health care personnel to pursue an associate degree in nursing. The degree will make those individuals eligible to take the board examination and become a registered nurse.
It’s also not clear that social media use contributes to young people’s emotional struggles, said Heather Kerkorian, who researches the effects of media on children’s development and family interactions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“If we look at individual kids, some kids might benefit a lot from social media, some might be harmed by social media and most of them are not affected much,” Kerkorian said.
Jenny Higgins, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Collaborative for Reproductive Equity and a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, said the biggest takeaway from the report was that these declines were not balanced out by increases in the number of abortions happening in states where abortion access is less restricted.
“One of the things that people had expected after Dobbs was that states like California would get an influx of people … states with relatively few restrictions,” Higgins said. “What the #WeCount report shows is that we haven’t seen the flooding into those states.”
They discussed updated leadership position descriptions, the Student Sustainability Advisory Council and legislation to encourage UW’s administration to prioritize students’ mental health in future academic calendars, among other things.
Currently, UW is feeling the effects of a national mental health crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic brought with it a decrease in mental health and an increase in demand for mental health resources and providers.
A liver transplant recipient formed a lasting bond with the family of his donor, according to UW Health.
When some UW Health patients send a message to their doctor, they’ll start getting a response written by artificial intelligence.
Experts say a crisis looms in healthcare as hundreds of thousands of nurses plan to exit the workforce within the next few years.
University Health Services Alcohol & Other Drug Misuse Prevention Specialist Jenna Retzlaff said Naloxone is a medication that can reverse an opioid overdose by blocking the effects of the opioids, including heroin, fentanyl and prescription opioid medication.
NBC 26 Today sat down with Dr. Kelly Collins, a pediatric transplant surgeon with UW Health Kids in Madison to talk about National Donate Life Month.
UW Health is among three health care providers using artificial intelligence developed by Microsoft Corp. to draft message responses in electronic medical records by Verona-based Epic Systems Corp., the companies said Monday.
When Allana Randall was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she turned to the canvas to help pull her through.
Sunday is National Healthcare Decisions Day, and UW Health is encouraging people to develop an advance care plan now to avoid stress and save money later.
This past fall, in what would be his last season as an eminent transplant surgeon after more than four decades at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Anthony D’Alessandro — “Tony” to friends — decided to do some pre-retirement housekeeping.
Rabab Nasim is a critical care fellow at UW Health and works in the Intensive Care Unit. She says it’s challenging to fast on-the-job, especially when she works day coverage.
In December, University of Wisconsin-Madison Economist Alan Sorensen told Wisconsin Public Radio that mergers may give hospitals more leverage in negotiations with insurance companies.
“Those negotiations are enormously important for the bottom lines of these companies,” Sorensen said at the time. “A lot of times what’s driving the mergers is that (hospital systems) feel like if they’re bigger, they’ll do better in those negotiations, they’ll have more bargaining power, they’ll be more indispensable to the insurance company.”
Universities across the state are beginning the process of embedding their school psychology graduate students into local public schools. That’s the case for UW-Madison, which is using a new $6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to recruit and train 24 new school psychology graduate students, with an emphasis on students of color, into Madison’s public schools over the course of five years.
The forms are meant to stay in the provider’s office, as with other medical evaluation forms a patient might fill out during an exam, said David Bernhardt, a UW Health Kids general pediatrician, sports medicine physician at UW Health and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
“The form is not designed to go back to the school, so the history and the physical exam form are meant as a framework to guide the provider in getting information in an efficient way,” he said.
“It’s really dynamic. We can expect that there will be mutations that pop up and a lot of them won’t be very successful at being transmitted and maintained in populations of animals,” Thomas Yuill, a professor emeritus of pathobiological science, forest and wildlife biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Jaundice occurs when blood contains an excess amount of bilirubin. “For most babies, this is not a big deal, it clears out,” Tiffany Green, an associate professor in the obstetrics and gynecology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Yahoo News. “But for a certain small subset of babies, high levels of bilirubin can lead to brain damage, including cerebral palsy and other illnesses.”
Thousands of clinical trials underway in Wisconsin require thousands of volunteers – people whose ailments, desire for compensation or altruism motivate them to take part in medical research. We talk with Betsy Nugent, the director of clinical research for the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine.
The University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute has released its new county health rankings. We speak with Sheri Johnson, the institute’s director about the variables that produce the healthiest communities.
UW Hospital violated state law by charging a Sun Prairie patient $110 to send her medical records to her attorneys electronically, the state Supreme Court ruled this week.
The leader of the social media and adolescent research team at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, Dr. Megan Moreno, says conversations about social media best practices need to include teenagers.
The growing research into PFAs contamination finds sources in everyday consumer goods like toilet paper and traces PFAs into Green Bay and the Great Lakes. We talk to Christy Remucal, is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and the director of the Water Science and Engineering Laboratory at UW-Madison, about where we’re finding PFAs in Wisconsin’s waters.
Health outcomes are not even across Wisconsin’s 72 counties, and even the healthiest counties have sharp disparities, with Black residents far more likely to die prematurely, according to new data from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Population Health Institute.
Two new reports from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention detail infant and maternal mortality rates in the U.S. We talk with Tiffany Green, a reproductive health expert and assistant professor in the Departments of Population Health Sciences and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, about what needs to be done to save the lives of mothers and their babies.
Quoted: On the other side of the debate is Mark Seidenberg, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the leading scientists cited by advocates for the science of reading. Seidenberg said there is a large volume of research that sheds light on how children learn to read and that supports the science of reading approach.
Can using such approaches raise the overall success of kids in becoming readers? “I think it’s huge,” Seidenberg said in an interview.
The new findings support Bernstein’s conclusion, said David Mott, a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy and the principal investigator on the new survey, which gathered almost 5,000 responses.
The Healthy Minds Program app was developed at the Center for Healthy Minds at University of Wisconsin—Madison. The Healthy Minds framework is based on four pillars critical for mental health and emotional well-being: awareness, connection, insight, and purpose.
Ozaukee County ranks the healthiest in Wisconsin and Menominee is the least healthy county in the state, according to new data from the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute released on Wednesday, March 29.
Written by Manuel P. Teodoro, an associate professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Teodoro studies water sector management, regulation, and finance.
University of Wisconsin–Madison researcher and assistant professor Nick Buttrick studies the psychological relationship that millions of Americans have with their guns. Buttrick’s research builds on the historical record to show that in the U.S.—the only country with more civilian firearms than people—white Southerners started cultivating the tradition of the home arsenal immediately after the Civil War because of insecurities and racial fears. During the rest of the 19th century, those anxieties metamorphosized into a fetishization of the firearm to the point that, in the present day, gun owners view their weapons as adding meaning and a sense of purpose to their lives.
Scientific American spoke with Buttrick about the psychological roots of the gun culture that has contributed to the more than 100 mass shootings that have occurred in the U.S. so far this year.
Noted: While the program was initially funded through a partnership between the city and the county, the city has taken on the program on its own since, with the support of a grant from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Partnership Program.
Quoted: Ajay Sethi, professor of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the free at-home tests are not only convenient but have been critical in making sure there’s equitable access to testing.
“Not everybody can afford tests if there was a charge for them,” he told Wisconsin Public Radio in February. “So they should continue to play a role. And it’s our job as a society to continue to promote COVID testing, because knowledge of your status of being infected with COVID goes a long way in taking the right steps to prevent spreading that virus to other people.”
Noted: Cao, 54, a research scientist at the University of Kansas, graduated from medical school in China and practiced internal medicine for a decade before immigrating to the U.S. with her family in 2006. Meanwhile, Liu, 26, is a current student at the Medical College of Wisconsin and is expected to graduate this May.
Last week, Cao learned she would be headed to the clinical pathology residency program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison while Liu learned he had matched with the radiation oncology residency program at the University of Pennsylvania in his hometown of Philadelphia.
The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention warns they’ve seen an increase in the potentially dangerous, drug-resistant fungus Candida aurus. We speak with Dr. David Andes, a UW Health infectious disease physician and Division chief for infectious disease at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, about maintaining sterile facilities and staying safe.
Noted: Before cross-country runner Sarah Shulze, 21, died by suicide at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in April 2022, the athletics department was expanding its professional mental health support from two staffers to six to help the school’s approximately 800 student-athletes, said David Lacocque, the department’s director of mental health and sport psychology. The department, known until eight months ago as “clinical & sport psychology,” changed its name in part because student-athletes were asking for mental health support.
In addition to scheduled appointments, the sports liaisons attend practices, team meetings, training sessions, and competitions to help normalize mental health concerns.
“Gone are the days when we sit in our office and wait for people to knock on the door and talk to us,” Lacocque said.
Abortion rights took center stage at the Wisconsin Supreme Court debate this week. And it could be a bellwether for how voters in swing states are reacting to the end of Roe. Tiffany Green is an associate professor at The University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Population Health Sciences and Obstetrics and Gynecology. She joined American Voices to discuss.
Dr. Ruthanne Chun, current section head of Clinical Oncology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, was recently acknowledged as one of the university’s Outstanding Women of Color honorees.
After developing pelvic nerve pain in November 2021, Yvonne Pawlowicz said she waited five months to see a neurologist at UW Health and another four months to see a gynecologist. This January, the gynecologist referred her to UW Health’s pain clinic for a nerve block. The earliest appointment was in May.
After he lost his glasses while kayaking in May 2022, Brett Balinsky realized his corrective vision prescription had expired. He called the eye care clinic at UW Health, where the scheduler said the earliest appointment was in March 2023.
NBC 26 Today sat down with Dr. Amy Peterson, a cardiologist with UW Health Kids in Madison to talk about the rise in kids with high cholesterol.
Dr. Peterson explained why we are seeing a rise in kids with high cholesterol, as new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that one in five children have an abnormal cholesterol count.
New data out this month from national health leaders show infant and maternal mortality rates have been on the rise the last few years. Additionally, people of color remain disproportionately affected.
“In some ways, this is not unexpected, per se,” Dr. Tiffany Green of UW-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health said. “You know, it’s hard sometimes because people were like, ‘Oh, this is a big deal.’ And we’re like, ‘Well, we’ve been talking about this for a very, very long time.’”
“Kidneys, to some extent, are usually protected by the ribs. But I think in (his) case, the pointy part of the football was aimed at the lower part of the kidney, which was not protected,” said Dr. Walid Farhat, a pediatric urologist with UW Health Kids and chief of pediatric urology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “I’d never seen a case like his before.”
A new program for UW-Madison pharmacy students looks to help address a rural shortage while giving students a hands-on experience.
In May 2021, UW’s School of Pharmacy began the Advanced Pharmacy Experience rotation. The program rotates students in their fourth year into rural pharmacies to practice under the supervision of a pharmacist preceptor.
University of Wisconsin Law School professor John Gross, director of the Public Defender Project, explains efforts by lawmakers to increase penalties for drug overdoses resulting in homicide charges.
UW Health and UnityPoint Health-Meriter still have mask requirements for patients and visitors. “We continue to monitor the improving trends related to the spread of COVID-19 in our communities and could adjust policies in the future,” UW Health spokesperson Emily Greendonner said.
There are many ways walking benefits the mind. For example, it can improve sleep and reduce stress. We talk with Dr. Shilagh Mirgain, a Distinguished Psychologist and Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, about how walking helps our mental health.
BEAM provides faculty with mentor training to guide medical students through undergraduate experiences.
Hosted by the Graduate School Office of Professional Development, Nolan presented “Collective Care: The Future of Well-Being for Our Campus Community.” With rising rates of mental health distress amid both graduate and undergraduate students, the presentation provided comprehensive care approaches to combat this issue.
March is colorectal cancer awareness month, and UW Health experts are urging patients to get screened.
