The European Society of Anaesthesiology (ESA) is to launch a safety starter kit containing a wide variety of essential resources to help raise safety standards in anesthesiology across Europe. The kit will be distributed on a memory stick at this year
Given their pervasiveness in hospitals, one could be forgiven to take picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) for granted. However, in reality, they have been around for less than two decades. The first PACS prototype was set up in 1990 at the University of California, and soon after at Hammersmith Hospital in London. Commercial products began to enter the market 3-4 years later but serious growth in PACS use was seen only in the early 2000s.
PACS: boost to productivity and imaging demand
PACS revolutionized workflow between radiology and other hospital departments, resulting in a gigantic leap in productivity. PACS also catalysed the growth of imaging, especially computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, whose huge masses of data it was able to process, store and forward to different users on demand.
Along with older X-Rays and ultrasound (whose data are also managed by PACS), CT and MRI devices have become integral to nearly every single surgical procedure, as well as the medical management of chronic diseases ranging from arthritis to cancer. In acute care settings such as A&E, their availability has directly contributed to a fall in patient waiting times and increased the efficiency of triaging.
2007: 3D video of beating heart
Until recently, 2D PACS was the only realistic choice. In spite of an explosion in core processing power and storage capacity, PACS technologies had been consistently outpaced by developments in CT, which permitted imaging of increasingly thinner slices, outputting exponentially larger volumes of data.
In 2007, Toshiba launched Aquilion One, with a capability of acquiring five 320 slices per second and attaining a highly-symbolic milestone
In 2012 there were 1.9 million cardiovascular related deaths within the European Union and 4 million deaths in Europe with the higher rate of deaths to be found in the Central and Eastern European countries. During June 2013, the European Society of Cardiology (ECS) released the results of their study comparing death from a cardiac event between the 1980s and the present. At a glance, the report appears to make happy reading. On average, the rate of heart disease related deaths have halved during that period within the European Union countries. This rate applies to both sexes as well as most age groups.
Dr Melanie Nichols, a Research Associate from the British Heart foundation Health Promotional Research Groups and her colleagues in the Oxford Research Group have looked at trends in death from coronary heart disease between 1980 and 2009 in both sexes and four age groups: under 45, 45-54, 55-64 and 65 years and over [1].
Lack of comparable data in Europe
One of the problems that Dr Nichols and her group have faced in assessing the data is the differences in the way that countries record and code data. That Europe suffers from a lack of data and comparable data is evident when reading the European Cardiovascular Disease Statistics published by the European Heart Network [2]. This is especially true for incidence rates, rates of surgical procedures as well as effects of regional diets etc. To better serve assessments such as this report, the European Union has the task of developing standard methods for collecting information and procedures for calibration of locally appropriate methods and questionnaires.
Nevertheless, while working within these constraints, Dr Nichols and colleagues found that:
Telemedicine has been around for many years, evolving in tandem with technological change and improvements. In essence, telemedicine delivers healthcare services by means of technology, in cases where the healthcare professional cannot attend to the patient physically. Tele-anesthesia takes it a step further by doing pre-operative consultations by means of telemedicine systems. In this article, the authors report of the growing use of tele-anesthesia.
by Dr Nora Terrasini, Dr Erik Arbeid, Dr Riccardo Taddei, Dr Cedrick Zaouter, Dr Shantale Cyr and Dr Thomas M Hemmerling
What is telemedicine?
Telemedicine is defined as the delivery of healthcare and sharing of medical knowledge over a distance, using telecommunications systems [1]. The World Health Organization gives a more extensive definition of what should be considered as telemedicine and describes it as
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