Thursday 29 August 2013

DOG BLOG

May I introduce you to Professor Edward T. Creagan. 
Professor Creagan is Professor of Oncology at New York Medical College and a Fellow in Internal Medicine at the Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Medicine






His recent publications include:

Dronca RS, Allred JB, Perez DG, Nevala WK, Lieser EA, Thompson M, Maples WJ, Creagan ET, Pockaj BA, Kaur JS, Moore TD, Marchello BT, Markovic SN.
Am J Clin Oncol. 2013 Jan 24. [Epub ahead of print]

Jatoi A, Allred JB, Suman VJ, Creagan ET, Croghan GA, Amatruda T, Markovic SN.
J Geriatr Oncol. 2012 Oct 1;3(4):307-311. Epub 2012 May 7.

He also wrote a BLOG recently on Pet therapy: How animals help us heal.

Dr Creagan believes in the healing power of pets. He talks of his life changing experience several years ago when a patient he thought he would lose was inspired to fight on by his overwhelming desire to return home to Max, his German Shepherd.

The Mayo Clinic takes the healing power of pets seriously. It has Jack; or to give him his correct title, Dr Jack. He is a 10 year old miniature pinscher. Dr Jack sees around ten patients a day. He is one of the thousands of canine healthcare ‘professionals’ known as ‘assistance dogs’. ‘Sometimes they help a healthcare provider with treatment and sometimes they just spend time with patients. The Health benefits are diverse’ writes Karen Ravn in the Los Angeles Times.

Mayo is world renowned for its scientific rigour and clinical excellence. There is something like 250 areas of research and numerous research projects being undertaken in each research area at any one time. Yet Mayo has Dr Jack. Mayo published a children’s book recently to explain the history of Mayo and what it does. They chose Jack as the vehicle to do this because they believe he exemplifies the Mayo model of care. The book is called ’Dr Jack: The Helping Dog’.

Another book published recently on the subject is ‘Dogs that Changed the World’. It tells the story of Daisy and Tangle, dogs able to sniff out cancer cells, and Delta, a German Shepherd who can sense changes in the blood sugar levels of her young master. And at the Sensory Research Institute at Florida State University in Tallahassee, scientists have trained dogs to detect the odour of skin melanomas and prostate cancer. Researchers are now training dogs to sniff out ovarian cancer.


 ISQua Staff Dogs:  Mr Johnny Angel, Maxie, McGrath, Scamp, Muhtar and Sasha  

Our pets are always therapeutic for us. But there are also the professional therapy dogs with which you will be familiar. I well remember visiting my Father in his Nursing Home where ‘Annie’ the therapy Golden Retriever used to bring so much joy to what might otherwise have been quite empty lives. In addition to providing companionship, researchers are now finding that these dogs are legitimately therapeutic. They have been found to reduce blood pressure and levels of stress hormones in heart failure patients and to have improved the focus and memory of patients with Alzheimer’s.

More and more clinicians, like Dr Creagan are embracing ‘pet therapy’ which surely would have been dismissed as nonsense even as recently as few years ago – if the notion was even seriously entertained at all. Certainly it works at the edges as an adjunct and a complementary application to the scientific method which will always prevail. But why not incorporate something that brings benefits if all it takes is ‘getting a dog in your life’.

Peter Carter
Chief Executive Officer
ISQua
August 29 2013 


Thursday 1 August 2013

Keep on Keeping on

Building 101 in Taipei city was once the tallest building in the world. It has been forced into second place by the recently completed Burj Khalifa building in Dubai.



The President of ISQua and I were delighted to be the guests of Dr Chiu-liu Lin, the Deputy EO of the Taiwan Joint Commission on Hospital Accreditation and Dr Wui-Chiang Lee, President of the Asian Society for Quality in Health Care at a dinner for speakers at the recent Asian countries accreditation meeting on the 85th floor of this building. Our delight was somewhat tempered however by typhoon Soulik which was rolling towards us and we were of course perfectly positioned to watch, with growing trepidation, its advance.

Typhoon Soulik battered Taiwan with torrential rain and powerful winds on Saturday that left two people dead and at least 100 injured.’ (Press report)

With a little speeding up of the courses we made our escape to the waiting bus and back to our hotel before the full force of Soulik hit in the early hours of the next morning.

I have worked on various projects in Asia for over 20 years but every time I return I am amazed and impressed by the work I see going on and in particular by the range and diversity of healthcare quality. In 1990, when CEO of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons I visited a surgeon working in a hospital in Pokhara, Nepal where waste from the operating room was washed into an open drain running alongside the wall of the room. Elsewhere I have seen the crispest and cleanest of bed linen in the wards but open windows with pigeons on the sills of the operating room and open drums of alcohol for scrubbing up before theatre. Yet Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and other Asian countries are an exemplar of what one might strive to achieve in healthcare quality.

Asia is not unique in this regard. And not only are the extremes inter country – they are also intra country. One sees the best and the worst of healthcare quality in Europe and the best and the worst in the United States; and it is the same the world over.



I have written before in this BLOG about the inequities in healthcare quality suffered by minority groups and this remains a problem and a concern. In some parts of the world however we see the reverse of this with a privileged few enjoying high quality healthcare while the majority try to get by.

I editorialised once in another magazine under the heading ‘Never Enough’ and I have spoken in this BLOG about our ‘…almost insatiable demand for healthcare services’. But while we all seek out healthcare services as and when we need them, some of us must wait longer for our consultation or procedure and, when the system is finally ready to take us, some of us will have to settle for whatever we can access and whatever we can afford rather than what we would prefer.

Have universal healthcare insurance schemes such as ‘Medicare’ in Australia, the NHS in the UK, schemes in Japan, New Zealand and a group of Nordic countries for example made a difference? Yes, in my view, but they have not produced anything like the health utopia their protagonists may have promised and they have not penetrated society to the extent that the especially needy and vulnerable such as the minorities to whom I so often refer have particularly benefitted. In a 2010 WHO report it was commented that:

 ‘Universal health care is not a one-size-fits-all concept; nor does it imply coverage for all people for everything. Universal health care can be determined by three critical dimensions: who is covered, what services are covered, and how much of the cost is covered.[1]

Along with education, free speech and a number of other fundamental rights, timely access to safe quality healthcare should be unqualified.

So many of us, ISQua included, will ‘keep on keeping on’ in this quest.

And having survived Soulik to be able to write this BLOG today I look forward to my visit to Dubai where I expect to experience a sand storm on the 101st floor of Burj Khalifa and be inspired to write my next BLOG.

Peter Carter
Chief Executive Officer
August 01 2013

1.                  a b World Health Organization (November 22, 2010). "The world health report: health systems financing: the path to universal coverage". Geneva: World Health Organization. ISBN 978-92-4-156402-1.