New Books in Nursing & Midwifery

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NUIG study finds 9 in 10 medical students may leave Ireland on qualifying

Pishoy Gouda, a final year medical student at NUI Galway, was the principal investigator of this study.

Nine out of 10 medical students plan to leave or are “contemplating” leaving Ireland when they qualify, a new study involving the State’s six training schools has found.

Read article here:  Ireland's medical brain drain: migration intentions of Irish medical students

Career opportunities, working conditions and lifestyle are cited as the top three factors for migration by some 88 per cent of over 2,000 students surveyed.

The study led by NUI Galway (NUIG) and published on Thursday has found pay was not a key issue among the respondents.

The Irish Hospital Consultants’ Association had said highly trained doctors are being “driven out”.

The study’s supervisor, NUIG senior lecturer in social and preventive medicine Dr Diarmuid O’Donovan, has called for action to retain medical graduates and attract back those who have already emigrated.

Staff at HSE West’s public health department and at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, University of Limerick, University College Cork, University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin were involved with NUIG in the study, published in the open access journal Human Resources for Health.

  

Some 1,519 of the 2,000-plus medical students surveyed were Irish, and some 85 per cent of the total identified career opportunities as a determining factor in going abroad. Some 83 per cent identified working conditions, and 80 per cent identified lifestyle as factors.

Some 34.3 per cent said they were “definitely” planning to migrate, and a further 53.3 per cent said they were contemplating it – a total of almost 88 per cent.

Final-year NUIG medical student Pishoy Gouda, the principal investigator, said previous studies on this theme had focused on graduates, whereas this analysis involved junior, intermediate and senior students in the six medical schools.

“We found the outcome alarming, as it shows that even pre-med and first-year students are thinking about leaving already,” he said. It reflected a “widespread culture of intention to migrate” in the medical schools.

view full article on Irish Times here

Lunchtime Lecture: 'Bodies of Knowledge', Wednesday 4th February, Hardiman Building

The Special Collections Lunchtime Lectures Series 2014-2015 will continue on Wednesday Feb. 4th, in Room G011 Seminar Room in the Hardiman Building at 1pm, with "Bodies of knowledge : the early days of anatomy in Galway" by Alexander Black, Anatomy, School of Medicine.

Anatomy was one of the founding departments of Queen's College Galway and was viewed at the time as a rather distasteful, if necessary, field of study, yet to be completely separated from its sibling discipline physiology. Anatomy is a visual and tactile subject, and perhaps relies on images and illustrations more than any other academic discipline.  This talk will cover the early days of anatomy in Galway, and will illustrate the importance of anatomy to society, society to anatomy, and medical imaging to medicine.

A selection of anatomy material from the Old Library Collection will be on display during the talk, and all are welcome to the G011 Seminar Room in the Hardiman Building at 1pm.

The accompanying "Art of the Unseen" exhibition of anatomical illustration will run in the Special Collections Reading Room during the month of February.

Dementia 'linked' to common over-the-counter drugs

A study has linked commonly used medicines, including over-the-counter treatments for conditions such as insomnia and hay-fever, to dementia.

All of the types of medication in question are drugs that have an "anticholinergic" effect.  Experts say people should not panic or stop taking their medicines.

In the US study in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, higher doses and prolonged use were linked to higher dementia risk in elderly people.

The researchers only looked at older people and found the increased risk appeared when people took drugs every day for three years or more.

All medicines can have side-effects and anticholinergic-type drugs that block a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine are no exception.

View more information here

Recent Acquisitions

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Recent online lectures in The Biomedical & Life Sciences Collection

Announcement: 

New Releases to The Biomedical & Life Sciences Collection:
Over 1,800 lectures by leading world experts

National University of Ireland - Galway has full access to all the lectures.
www.hstalks.com/access/  
On campus, you should be automatically authenticated.

Psychopharmacogenetics series, edited by Dr. Maria Arranz - Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London

1.    Influence of neurotransmitter receptor variants on interactions with Psychotropic Drugs

2.    Tailoring psychiatric treatment using genetic information: pharmacogenetic prediction of treatment response

Synapses, Neurotransmitters and Receptor Channels series, edited by Prof. Stuart Cull-Candy, University College London 

3.    Vesicular release of transmitter at active zones

Systems Biology series, edited by Prof. Hiroaki Kitano – Systems Biology Institute & Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc., Tokyo, Japan

4.    Interactome networks and human disease

Evolution and Medicine series, edited by Prof. Randolph Nesse – University of Michigan, USA

5.    The evolutionary web of life

Physiology and Pathophysiology of Neuroglia series, edited by Prof. Alexei Verkhratsky – University of Manchester, UK and Prof. Vladimir Parpura – University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA

6.    Cannabinoid type 1 receptors in Astrocytes

Parkinson's Disease series, edited by Prof. Ariel Deutch – Vanderbilt University, USA

7.    Mitochondrial and lysosomal dysfunction in the pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease

Signal Transduction via Protein Tyrosine Kinase Receptors series, edited by Prof. Carl-Henrik Heldin, Ludwig Institute of Cancer Research, Sweden

8.    The ERK1/2 MAPK cascade

Tuberculosis series, edited by Dr. Mario Raviglione and Dr. Paul Nunn, Stop TB Department, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland 

9.    Pharmacometrics in tuberculosis

Respiratory Infection series, edited by Prof. Stephen Gillespie – University of St. Andrews, UK

10.    Responding to pandemic influenza

Topical Talks series

11.    Immunosuppressive mechanisms in myeloid cells

12.    Pharmacometric approaches to optimize use of drugs and dialysis treatments in patients with chronic kidney disease

Epilepsy and Seizures series, edited by Prof. Steven Schachter – Harvard University Medical School

13.    Epilepsy

'Instagram for doctors' to be launched in Europe

Figure 1: A photo-sharing app for doctors

An app which enables healthcare professionals to share photos is to be rolled out across western Europe by the end of the year.

The app was designed to enable doctors to share pictures of their patients, both with each other and with medical students.

So far, more than 150,000 doctors have uploaded case photos with the patient's identity obscured.

However, some experts have expressed concern about patient confidentiality.

Patients' faces are automatically obscured by the app but users must manually block identifying marks like tattoos.

Each photo is reviewed by moderators before it is added to the database.

Founder Dr Josh Landy told the BBC that the Figure 1 service did not access any patient records.

"We do not possess any personal medical data at all. The best way to keep a secret is not to have it. We are not an organisation that delivers healthcare," he told the BBC.

But doctors must provide identifying credentials and are also advised to notify their employees and patients to find out about consent policies.

The app is already available in North America, the UK and Ireland.

While digital services such as UpToDate and DynaMed - both requiring a subscription - are already widely used within the healthcare community as clinical knowledge databases, they are not rivals to Figure 1, said Dr Landy.

"UpToDate is an app I love, and have used for years. However, they have a highly curated repository of articles written and edited by experts in the field."

"What our app does is provide the opportunity to contribute any case no matter how classic or unusual. Ours is all image-based and totally crowdsourced."

View more on BBC/Health here

Aid to Professionalism

Professionalism is a challenging endeavour for Medical Students.
An aid to support the journey to Professionalism is provided by -
Professionalism in Medicine (Spandorfer et al) which is located at
610.69 PRO
This is a Case-Based Guide for Medical Students -

                                   

Trusty stethoscope faces threat from portable hi-tech

The stethoscope has long been the main tool in the doctor's toolkit

In TV medical dramas, doctors and nurses are never without one. At the surgery, it is the GP's best friend.

Along with the white coat, the stethoscope is among the most recognisable symbols of the medical profession.

But according to an editorial in the journal Global Heart this week, the stethoscope is in its death throes, in danger of being consigned to medical history, having been overtaken by technology.

So are the stethoscope's days numbered?

Used to listen to the internal sounds of the human body, particularly the heart, lungs and abdomen, the stethoscope has been around for nearly 200 years.

However, Prof Jagat Narula and associate professor Bret Nelson, from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, believe that handheld ultrasound devices are set to take over from the traditional stethoscope.

They say this is because ultrasound technology is becoming more accurate, the devices are reducing in size and their cost gradually decreasing.

However, Dr Sarah Clarke, a consultant cardiologist at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge and vice-president of the British Cardiovascular Society, says the stethoscope is a doctor's main diagnostic tool.

"We don't leave home without it. You can't replace what you hear if you're a doctor. It's a big part of our training.

View more information on BBC/Health here

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NUI Galway Medical Graduates Deliver Intern-led Teaching programme to Final Medical Students

The final year of NUI Galway’s undergraduate medical curriculum has been enhanced by an intern teaching programme, which has been developed and delivered in first semester of the current academic year.

Newly graduated medical doctors teach NUI Galway’s final year medical students and simultaneously act as mentors and role models. This is achieved ‘by on the ward training’ whereby medical interns teach groups of five medical students and take them through the assessment of common patient presentations they encounter, covering history-taking, examination, clinical reasoning and management skills essential to becoming a competent doctor. Teaching takes place at the bedside, in a clinical context.

There are plans to continue this Intern-led Teaching Programme into semester two when those students who have been in the Medical Academies in semester one return to Galway. The final medical students will themselves be graduating in June 2014, and it is anticipated that many of them, having experienced the benefit of the Intern-led Teaching Programme, will volunteer their time and skills to teach and thus continue this valuable teaching programme.

View full article here

Honorary degree for Aran doctor and lifeboat medical officer

Dr Marion Broderick, general practitioner for the Aran Islands, was conferred yesterday with the Honorary Degree of Master of Health Sciences at NUI Galway

By currach, lifeboat and helicopter, Aran island doctor Marion Broderick has saved as many lives at sea as on land over the past 32 years.

The general practitioner’s “solo” role as “first port in the storm” and advocate for her community was recognised yesterday by NUI Galway (NUIG), which conferred her with a masters degree in health science.

Dr Broderick, who has also served as medical officer to the RNLI lifeboat, epitomises the best definition of “optimal” general practice, Prof Andrew W Murphy said in his citation at the conferring yesterday.

That definition, articulated by world authority Barbara Starfield in the Lancet journal, involves providing “first contact, continuous, comprehensive and co-ordinated care” to people “undifferentiated by gender, disease or organ system”, Prof Murphy said.

“In a world reduced to statements of 140 characters, the concept of simply being there over an extended period of time seems revolutionary,” Prof Murphy said.

“It can also appear that doctors are expected to know more and more, about less and less, making comprehensive care an unrealisable fairytale,” he said, while co-ordination is “generally overlooked and always underestimated”.

Dr Broderick was one of the first in Ireland to use tele-healthcare and “near patient” testing, he said, and she was “intrinsic” to the development on the island of Arás Ronán, a 12-bed nursing home.

Rural practice is universally recognised as being tough, and island practice even tougher, he said, noting that she was unsure last week if she would have locum cover to travel in for the conferring.

Click here to view full article in The Irish Times

View also Press Release from NUI, Galway here

Most Recent Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine

 Nobel Laureates: 2010-2011-2012-2013

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2013

James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof

"for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells"

 

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2012

Sir John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka

"for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent"

 

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2011

Bruce A. Beutler and Jules A. Hoffmann

"for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity"

Ralph M. Steinman  "for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity"

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2010

Robert G. Edwards

"for the development of in vitro fertilization"