NOTIONS TO SMALL FOR A BLOG POST, ALL IN ONE PLACE, A.K.A. THE PERIODIC LINK DUMP.
Further to my post “Sleepy Sleepy Nurse”: Sleep or Die. Really.
My job: Registered Nurse.
We don’t know as much about infection control as we think we do. “Less than a quarter of the Clostridium difficile cases in a hospital could be traced to patients in the same ward, challenging a common assumption about how the infection spreads.” Medscape summary. Original article here.
And we’re not as smart at Triage as we think we are. Analyzing the records of 519 patients aged 65 years or older who were triaged using the Emergency Severity Index, from University Hospital Basel in Switzerland, found that 117 patients were undertriaged and 15 were overtriaged.” Anecdotally, I think this is true. My only quibble is why the small sample size? I mean, 519 patients is two days of volume in a busy ED, which means only a few poorly trained triage nurses could skew the results.
Nurses’ Presenteeism and Its Effects on Self-Reported Quality of Care and Costs. I read the article and went “Meh.“ Rather evades the real issues around presenteeism, i.e. workplaces penalizing nurses for taking sick time.
Oh, dear.
On the menu: Pink Slime! I swear I will never, ever buy ground beef ever again.
Younger than the Happy Meal. An important reminder from Fred Clark the supposedly “eternal” truths about abortion maintained by evangelical Christians are of much more recent vintage than you think.
Great music in the cause of crap content. Dissecting the cultural significance of country music. Quote:
The conservative movement has been cannibalizing conservative art for years now, to the point where I’d say country music is far from a victory of conservative cultural or artistic success and is instead a mirror image of what conservative politics have become: easy and unthinking. No depth, all surface. Superficial and insular. Maybe I’m wrong, but building an entire genre on the back of the idea that regurgitating the same sound on top of the same basic premise over and over again hardly strikes me as a triumph of cultural conservatism.
What language do deaf people think in?
Ayn Rand is the Karl Marx of the Right. Mostly because she tells people with incredible amounts of privilege they are the real victims in life’s lottery. Quote: “She offers them something that is crucial to every successful political movement: a sense of victimhood. She tells them that they are parasitised by the ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments.”
The Reformed Whores respond to Rush Limbaugh: “I’m a slut.” Hugely funny and right on the money.
