Doctors proudly display their diplomas in their offices, but next time you’re up for surgery, know this: Patients treated by better-educated nurses have a greater chance of surviving their operations.
That’s the conclusion of a new study, which found patients do better at hospitals where the nursing staff has more years of schooling under their scrubs. The impact of education on patient survival was as strong as the effect of the patient-nurse ratio, a well-established predictor of a successful hospital stay.
“A growing caseload and education are equally important” predictors of survival after surgery, said study leader Linda Aiken, director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Nursing.
Raising a hospital’s share of bedside nurses with bachelor’s degrees from 20 percent to 60 percent and keeping the patient-nurse ratio at 4-1 would save four lives per 1,000 surgery patients, the researchers say: “The greater proportion of nurses with baccalaureate degrees, the better the outcome for the patient.”
Aiken’s study appeared in Tuesday’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Help for cocaine users
Gamma-vinyl-GABA (GVG), a drug used to treat epilepsy, appears to help people end their addiction to cocaine, according to the results of the first human trial on heavy users.
“In a population of hard-core cocaine users, we were able to block their craving for the drug and keep them off cocaine for over 90 days,” said researcher Dr. Stephen Dewey, a senior scientist with the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.
“We were able to do this despite their living in their communities where all the cues and all the environmental triggers that cause relapse are at work,” he added.
The research team treated 19 men and one woman who had been cocaine addicts for 3 to 15 years. During the first week of the trial, which took place in the Mexican state of Baja California, the subjects received doses of GVG up to 3 grams. Thereafter, the patients received maintenance doses of 4 grams. During the trial, patients had to remain free of cocaine for 28 days.
After that, the dose of GVG was reduced by 1 gram per week over three weeks, which completed the treatment.
Eight of the subjects dropped out of the trial during the 10 days because they did not want to stop using cocaine, according to the report in last Monday’s online edition of Synapse.
But eight completed the study and were taken off GVG. All of these subjects have remained cocaine-free for more than a month after stopping GVG. And the four patients, though not able to kick their habit, reduced their cocaine use by up 50 percent to 80 percent.
