Last week, a Philippine nurse won the prestigious Aster Guardians Global Nursing Award. She was honored for helping to develop a system in which injured and sick people can be airlifted out of disaster areas. She was one of 10 finalists for the award.
Another finalist was Gonzaga nursing professor Martin Schiavenato, who has developed devices that allow health care providers to measure the pain that young children experience.
“We observe an event on an infant, let’s say the changing of a diaper, which doesn’t sound like much to us, but for a premature infant, it’s distressful. We have a nurse that sits there and observes and does the pen-and-paper form and those are usually on a scale of one-to-10. At the same time, we’re capturing those signals that we mentioned earlier. What we do is we use machine learning to then train the algorithm to match what the nurse says that that pain level is," he said.
"We have, more or less, created a nurse that’s observing and quantifying pain distress on these infants 24/7, in real time."
Tacoma oncologist Dr. Blair Irwin sees patients at the MultiCare Regional Cancer Center and often prescribes drugs to help them treat their symptoms. The problem is that some of those drugs are now difficult to find.
“There are a couple of medications that we use for cancers that are generic drugs. And they have low margins and so there are not very many companies who manufacture it. So if there is so few manufacturers and something goes wrong with one of the manufacturers, then we run into supply issues," she said.
Irwin says when the preferred drugs run short, oncologists have to improvise and prescribe medication that’s considered less effective.
People often dread holiday gatherings, where they might face conversations with relatives who don’t agree with them politically. Some people avoid those discussions. But comedian and author Kat Timpf says we should lean into those talks to start bridging ideological divides.
