New Jerseyans might wonder why they’re suddenly seeing billboards featuring a pleading dog, next to the text “Don’t kill man’s best friend for medical testing.” It’s part of a Washington D.C. based physicians’ non-profit’s new campaign, targeting the Morristown Hospital in New Jersey for practicing surgery on live dogs that are euthanized after the session. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted billboards near the Morristown train station and is planning one along the highway as well.

 The group writes on its website:

At Morristown Medical Center in New Jersey, emergency medicine residents are taught procedural skills using live dogs. Trainees are instructed to make incisions, insert a tube into a dog’s chest cavity, crack open the breastbone in order to access the heart, and insert or drill a needle into the animal’s bones. At the end of each training session, the animals are killed,

The group claims this procedure is at odds with today’s standards of practice. Out of 200 similar programs in the country, the group has surveyed 160 hospitals. Reportedly, 89 percent of surveyed emergency medicine programs use non-animal methods to practice operations, such as human body simulators or cadavers, which allow medical students to make mistakes and learn at their own pace, without it ending with an injured or dead animal.

NJ Hospital using live dogs to train surgical residents! Where is @peta ? https://t.co/w7fIVltWYJ pic.twitter.com/jb8JWRikhn

— Johnny Rivera (@prjohnnyrivera) November 17, 2016

The physician’s group was founded in 1985 and lobbies to end all kinds of animal testing. John Pippin, the group’s director of academic affairs, said that Morristown is the only hospital that reported it uses dogs for its residency training program. The few others that still use live animals typically use pigs instead, a less controversial practice.

But Morristown Hospital’s spokeswoman, Elaine Andrecovich, defended the practice. She said it is an essential way for emergency medicine doctors to practice crucial skills that they can’t learn through simulation or through training devices. According to Andrecovich, the dogs are only used when preparing for “rare, life-saving procedures uncommonly seen” in actual life. She also pointed out that simulators couldn’t compete with “the physiological or anatomical equivalent of live tissue.”

The hospital has not revealed where it performs the procedures on the dogs, only that it is not at the hospital or its property.

Emma Von Zeipel

Emma Von Zeipel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. She is originally from one of the islands of Stockholm, Sweden. After working for Democratic Voice of Burma in Thailand, she ended up in New York City. She has a BA in journalism from Stockholm University and is passionate about human rights, good books, horses, and European chocolate. Contact Emma at EVonZeipel@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Nonprofit Campaigns Against New Jersey Hospital Using Dogs for Medical Training appeared first on Law Street.

Picture this: you wake up in the middle of the night with insane abdominal pain and call 911 to be rushed to the hospital immediately. Once you get there, the doctors decide you are suffering from acute appendicitis and you have to quickly be prepared for an emergency surgery to remove your appendix. Before you’re put under anesthesia, you notice the nurse prepping you is stumbling around, tripping over chords, and is seemingly having a hard time doing average tasks. Worried yet?

This exact scenario unfolded earlier this month at the Wilkes-Barre VA Medical Center, for which a nurse has been charged with reckless endangerment of a patient’s safety, driving under the influence, and public intoxication for showing up to work and then proceeding to work on an appendectomy while drunk.

The story, according to the drunk nurse, Richard Pieri, was that he had forgotten that he was on call at the hospital on February 4 until he received a call around midnight telling him to come into work on an emergency surgery. At that point, Pieri was already four or five beers deep at a local casino, but still decided it would be better to drive while intoxicated to the hospital and work on this surgery than it would be to acknowledge his mistake. In court documents, Pieri acknowledged that he just didn’t want someone else to have to come in while he was supposed to be on call. That is why he decided drunk surgery was a good plan–a great reminder to us all that alcohol can seriously inhibit good decision-making skills. Authorities later visited Piere and asked him if he knew why they were there to chat with him, Pieri nonchalantly responded, “I guess it has something to do with me being drunk on call.”

The Department of Veterans Affairs sent a statement to the Washington Post noting that it will not tolerate behavior like this, especially since it can put veterans who are coming in for care at serious risk. The VA is currently working on reinforcing its guidelines for staff and ensuring that an incident like this never happens again. Pieri’s affidavit notes that he was tasked with prep work that was legitimately important:

[He] was responsible for preparing the patient, retrieving the patient, preparing the materials inside the room, documenting the surgery, and monitoring the vitals of the patient throughout recovery.

In addition, the affidavit pointed out that the operating room, in general, can be dangerous if someone is intoxicated:

[The operating room] is filled with complicated equipment that Pieri needs to operate and has several loose wires and cords that can be tripped on or disconnected by somebody with an inability to properly ambulate themselves.

While details about the patient have not yet been released, reports indicate that he or she was readmitted to the hospital after the surgery for complaints of stomach pains. There is no evidence to suggest that this readmission has anything to do with Pieri’s drunkenness–thank goodness–but he was promptly removed from patient care responsibilities after this incident.

While this story turned out alright (for the most part), it’s a sobering reminder to us all that alcohol can have serious consequences in certain situations. Just because you think you’re alright to drive home, make a large purchase, or even perform a serious medical procedure, doesn’t mean you are. So, think carefully about when and where you drink and make responsible decisions everyone, because no one wants to be that guy who was jokingly asked, “Rick, are you drunk?” after he stumbled into work.

Alexandra Simone

Alex Simone is an Editorial Senior Fellow at Law Street and a student at The George Washington University, studying Political Science. She is passionate about law and government, but also enjoys the finer things in life like watching crime dramas and enjoying a nice DC brunch. Contact Alex at ASimone@LawStreetmedia.com

The post Drunk Nurse Arrested for Reckless Endangerment appeared first on Law Street.

“10, 9, 8, 7…” you count back as you begin to drift into an anesthetic haze. Soon you’re completely unconscious, and your surgery is underway. The surgeon begins to open you up for a complicated procedure, and your anesthesiologist is…sexting? Well, that’s not so unfathomable. Last week, Seattle anesthesiologist Dr. Arthur Zilberstein’s medical license was suspended due to allegations that he was sexting during surgery. According to the Medical Quality Assurance Commission, Zilberstein repeatedly sent sexually explicit text messages while acting as the lead anesthesiologist in surgeries. The Washington State Department of Health has reported that the doctor had “compromised patient safety due to his preoccupation with sexual matters while he was on hospital duty between at least April and August 2013.”

This was not just a quick, one time thing. The doctor sent dozens of messages on numerous occasions. On June 17, 2013, Zilberstein sent 64 texts over the course of seven surgeries. Most of these messages were sent minutes apart, including one that read, “I’m hella busy with C sections.” It’s clear he wasn’t “hella busy” enough to put down the phone. During an August 6 surgery Zilberman exchanged 45 sexually explicit text messages.

Swedish Medical Center, the hospital where Zilberstein worked, released a statement shortly after the allegations were made public: “Respondent’s lack of focus on patient care while providing anesthesia services for hospital-based surgical procedures routinely fell below the standard of care and put patients at unreasonable risk of harm.” The statement also read:

The safety of our patients is our number one priority, once we learned that the State had suspended this physician’s medical license, the physician’s Medical Staff membership and privileges were immediately suspended. We just recently learned of these allegations and are conducting our own internal review of the physician, who is not directly employed by Swedish.

While naturally there are going to be distractions in the operating room, they have skyrocketed over the past several years with the increased reliance on technology. We are constantly texting and checking our phones throughout the day. But what place do cell phones have in the operating room where lives are on the line? A panel of surgeons, organized by the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, discussed distractions in the operating room and their potential impacts on patient safety. According to Dr. Daniel White, electronic distractions in the operating room are reaching “epidemic levels.” The combination of natural and electronic distractions are making both communication and concentration, which are key for performing a successful surgery, extremely difficult.

In particular, anesthesiologists need to have perfect timing and focus in order to perform their duties correctly, meaning that any small distraction could become a huge problem. The doctors on the panel compared the duties of an anesthesiologist to those of a pilot, and suggest that the “sterile cockpit” rules that pilots use should be followed by surgeons and anesthesiologists. According to Dr. Dwight Burney, “the sterile cockpit means that no tasks are to be undertaken by the flight crew during the critical phases of taxi, takeoff, and landing in any operation below 10,000 feet above ground level other than level flight and cruising.” Essentially, during these “critical phases,” the pilot’s complete focus should be on flying the plane and under no circumstances should he or she be doing anything else. He explains how “several articles in the anesthesia literature talk about the critical phases of anesthesia — induction and emergence — that are analogous to critical phases in aviation — take off and landing.” If these rules were to be adopted by surgeons, there would be no avoidable distraction, like cell phones, allowed during these phases of surgery.

This story has received a lot of buzz on the internet, and many people are wondering the same thing that I am: how was this allowed to go on for so long? Didn’t anyone notice him using his cell phone during surgery? Jan Mannino, in a comment on a Huffington Post article said, “as a long practicing nurse anesthetist, I am here to tell you that you can’t be playing on a cell phone and closely monitoring the patient at the same time. And to think he was billing for his anesthesia.” Joan Lemme commented, “And how long has this been going on? It was not obvious to the surgeon that he was using his cell phone? Sounds like many were ignoring it for some time.”

So why was it ignored? Well, the truth is that there are no laws banning cell phones during surgery. As a result, no one had any reason to speak up. Some individual hospitals, such as Torrence Memorial Medial Center in Los Angeles, have rules regarding cell phones in their hospitals. After an incident in 2009 where a staff member was caught taking pictures of a naked patient, the hospital made a rule prohibiting cell phones in all patient areas. With a higher prevalence of these incidents due to increased cell phone use, one has to wonder why these rules regarding cell phones have not yet been turned into laws. Perhaps this situation will be a wakeup call and we will finally see the necessary changes to these laws. While, thankfully, no patients were injured or killed as a result of Zilberstein’s actions, he compromised their safety and was completely inappropriate. If something had happened, Zilberstein and Swedish Medical Center could have been looking at a huge malpractice suit costing them millions of dollars. Technology is advancing, and the laws need to keep up.

—

Brittany Alzfan (@BrittanyAlzfan) is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Pro Juventute via Flickr]

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Sexting Anesthesiologist’s License Suspended appeared first on Law Street.