We're all about children!
 March 2007
This edition:
Letter From Our Chair
Our department has made remarkable progress in the last few years with innovation and accomplishment in both research and clinical activities. The Darby Children's Research Institute has just celebrated its second anniversary. This visionary approach to solving the riddles of children's diseases is now showing major gains. We have new programs, new investigators and new successes. Similarly, we have been working in the clinical arenas to improve our performance and recognition. Our clinicians have worked diligently to provide innovative services and to improve patient satisfaction. This is an ongoing process which is succeeding month by month. Our emergency department was recently recognized as one of the Top 10 in the country by Child magazine. Several faculty members are now asking whether the focus on accomplishment in these two important areas may have, in fact, distracted us from our primary mission in recent years. [read more] Feature Story Improved child abuse program serves more kids, trains more medical professionals With more funds and a beefed-up staff, the Children's Hospital's child abuse and neglect program doubled the number of local children it served over the last year. The program provided medical services to nearly 1,000 children and adolescents in 2006, twice the number reached in the previous year. "We anticipate that it will grow another 50 percent, and possibly 100 percent, over the next two years." says Dr. Anne Abel, a forensic pediatrician who became director of the MUSC program a year ago. [read more] Message From Our Medical Director
[read more] Update From Our Administrator
The Medical Center and the Children's Hospital have been involved in several initiatives in the last year to improve the working atmosphere for our staff and improve the impression of the service that we provide for our patients and their families. As Dr. Saul mentioned, we have spent a lot of time training everyone in the AIDET technique in hopes of helping our staff to improve the communication and trust with our patients. During the first quarter of this fiscal year, we were rated at the 42nd percentile by our patient's family's which is certainly not where we wanted to be. During October and November, the staff was trained in AIDET and there have been a lot of activities to encourage the use of the technique. I am pleased to report that in the second quarter we moved to the 77th percentile overall and currently we are ranked at the 84th percentile. This important communication technique helps people feel good about the competence of the care provider and improves the trust by the patient. Having a child in the hospital is a traumatic event for any parent and we want to do what is necessary to bring the anxiety down during their stay at MUSC. We are confident in the expertise and clinical abilities of our physicians and staff and now we are also focusing on the service that is provided. MUSC Excellence is alive and well in the Children's Hospital. Darby Children's Research Institute News
Researchers win sought-after CTSA Awards Three cross-disciplinary pilot projects involving DCRI investigators have won highly coveted CTSA awards. The awards are funded by a CTSA internal institution grant, explains Dr. Kathleen Brady, director of the General Clinical Research Center and part of a committee that selected the winning studies. Of nearly 100 applications, the committee chose to fund nine pilot projects, all of which were translational and collaborative in nature. That three of the CTSA awardees have come out of the DCRI is pretty amazing, says Dr. Bernie Maria, executive director. "For an institute that's been operating for just two years, we effectively competed for these awards," he notes. "That really says something about the performance of this institute." [read more] Evidence-Based Tip
Comparative studies of diagnostic tests tell us how well a particular test does, compared to the truth as best we know it, usually as determined by a "gold standard" test. The results are reported as sensitivity (percentage of patients with the disease who correctly tested positive) and specificity (percentage of patients without the disease who correctly tested negative). These are helpful numbers, but we would like to know more. We need the likelihood ratio. The likelihood ratio is a relative measure, combining both sensitivity and specificity. A positive likelihood ratio (+LR or LRpos) gives the odds that a test result would occur in our patient with the condition we are testing for, as opposed to a patient without the condition we are testing for. [read more] A special thanks to the following individuals for their efforts in putting together Kids Connection each month. Editor: Bernard L. Maria, MD, MBA Publisher: Jennifer Cherock (Trio Solutions Inc.) Feature Writer: Mary Sue Lawrence, Trio Solutions Inc Contributing Writers: Lyndon Key, Bernard Maria, John Sanders, Inderjit Singh, Laura Cousineau |
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