Skip to main content

Get Out the Vote - GeriPal Style

Football season is now over. Baseball season doesn't start until April. Worst of all, the World Curling Championship is still more than a month away. How the heck are you going to support your ongoing need to cheer on the home team? Here is a suggestion – root for Geripal in Medgadgest's Seventh Annual Medical Weblog Awards.

Geripal has been nominated as one of the 5 Best Clinical Sciences Weblogs. The competition is fierce with names like Academic Life in Emergency Medicine, EMCrit blog, Renal Fellow Network, and Resus M.E! Even though I really like all their sites, I think it is time to show them what a community focused on geriatrics, hospice, and palliative care can do when we put our minds to it.

So, lets get out the vote. Click on the award link and take 3 seconds to vote for geripal (really - I swear - all it takes is 3 seconds).

by: Eric Widera

Vote for GeriPal for
Best Clinical Sciences Blog
(Polls close Feb 13, 2011)

Comments

Christian Sinclair, MD said…
Eric and Alex and the rest of the GeriPal crew....congrats on your nomination. I really think this is your year and the year for a HPM related blog to win!!! Pallimed and Medical Futility have both been nominated in the past but did not win. I am dedicated to getting out the vote and will be posting to Pallimed tomorrow. Way to go!!

And the announcements of the winners will be while we are in Vancouver!
February 7, 2011 at 10:21 PM
Eric Widera said…
Thanks Christian. It's remaining a pretty tight race. I think it is time to turn up the throttle.
February 8, 2011 at 10:25 AM
Amy Corcoran MD said…
I voted for GeriPal!
February 8, 2011 at 3:20 PM
Christian Sinclair, MD said…
Here is a little bit of support from our few readers over at Pallimed...
February 8, 2011 at 9:04 PM
Earl Quijada said…
Voted. Great job Eric and Alex. Tight race 27 votes ahead...
February 8, 2011 at 9:14 PM
Anonymous said…
Remember you can vote each and every day, polls are almost closed and the renal guys are neck and neck. Spread the word.
February 10, 2011 at 3:49 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Dangers of Fleet Enemas

The dangers of oral sodium phosphate preparations are fairly well known in the medical community. In 2006 the FDA issued it’s first warning that patients taking oral sodium phosphate preparations are at risk for potential for acute kidney injury. Two years later, over-the-counter preparations of these drugs were voluntarily withdrawn by the manufacturers.  Those agents still available by prescription were given black box warnings mainly due to acute phosphate nephropathy that can result in renal failure, especially in older adults. Despite all this talk of oral preparations, little was mentioned about a sodium phosphate preparation that is still available over-the-counter – the Fleet enema.

Why Oral Sodium Phosphate Preparations Are Dangerous 

Before we go into the risks of Fleet enemas, lets spend just a couple sentences on why oral sodium phosphate preparations carry significant risks. First, oral sodium phosphate preparations can cause significant fluid shifts within the colon …
7 comments
Read more

Opening the Black Box of LTACs: Podcast with Anil Makam

What happens in Long Term Acute Care Hospitals, or LTACs (pronounced L-tacs)?  I've never been in one.  I've sent patients to them - usually patients with long ICU stays, chronically critically ill, with a gastric feeding tube and a trach for ventilator support.  For those patients, the goals (usually as articulated by the family) are based on a hope for recovery of function and a return home.

And yet we learn some surprising things from Anil Makam, Assistant Professor of Medicine at UCSF.  In his JAGS study of about 14,000 patients admitted to LTACHs, the average patient spent two thirds of his or her remaining life in an institutional settings (including hospitals, LTACs and skilled nursing facilities).  One third died in an LTAC, never returning home.

So you would think with this population of older people with serious illness and a shorter prognosis than many cancers, we would have robust geriatrics and palliative care in LTACs?  Right? Wrong.

3% were seen by a geriatrici…
1 comment
Read more

Length of Stay in Nursing Homes at the End of Life

One out of every four of us will die while residing in a nursing home. For most of us, that stay in a nursing home will be brief, although this may depend upon social and demographic variables like our gender, net worth, and marital status. These are the conclusions of an important new study published in JAGS by Kelly and colleagues (many of whom are geripal contributors, including Alex Smith and Ken Covinsky).

The study authors used data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to describe the lengths of stay of older adults who resided in nursing homes at the end of life. What they found was that out of the 8,433 study participants who died between 1992 and 2006, 27.3% of resided in a nursing home prior to their death. Most of these patients (70%) actually died in the nursing home without being transferred to another setting like a hospital.

 The length of stay data were striking:

the median length of stay in a nursing home before death was 5 months the average length of stay was l…
13 comments
Read more