For those of you writing weekend stories, here's an idea. People who have heart attacks on weekends tend to wait longer to get medical care. Weekend heart attacks (and strokes) also tend to be more damaging, and lead to more fatalities.
That's according to a new study published in The New England Journal of Medicine. But there is another factor. The study says:
Although most service industries operate on a daily basis, many hospitals provide routine care on weekdays and only emergency or urgent care on weekends. Hospital staffing is reduced on weekends, both numerically and in terms of available expertise on site.
Maybe because there are fewer staff and specialists, patients admitted on a weekend tended to get less invasive treatment than they would have on a weekday. In other words, on a weekend you are more likely to get a wait-and-see kind of treatment, while on a weekday they might do angioplasty or other procedures.
The study said researchers at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, N.J., tracked 231,164 patients admitted for a first heart attack from 1987 to 2002.
See coverage from the Chicago Tribune, MSNBC and The New York Times.
The Times reports:
Other studies have found that weekend heart attack patients are sicker and waited longer before going to hospitals. The time is limited, a few hours at most, from the beginning of a heart attack to when it is too late for angioplasty to save a life.
The new study did not include data on the severity of the heart attacks, how sick patients were or how long they waited before going to hospitals.
The
Tribune puts the findings in perspective:
The added risk is relatively small, about one extra death per 100 admissions per year. Nevertheless, the study suggests that better access to care on weekends -- perhaps by having ambulances deliver patients directly to hospitals whose cardiac catheterization teams are on duty -- could prevent several thousand deaths a year in the U.S.
More Lead in Jewelry
The Consumer Product Safety Commission just recalled a bunch of the cheap jewelry that's sold at places like Claire's, amusement parks and novelty stores nationwide. The jewelry was found to contain lead, a problem that apparently has been going on for a couple of years. A year ago, big retailers like KMart, Sears, Target and Macy's agreed to eliminate jewelry with lead from their shelves. I wonder what you would find if you went shopping.
Al's Morning Multimedia
Today's idea is inspired from something that Air & Space magazine is doing. The magazine is asking readers to search their attics to find historic photos of flying machines and the people who flew them. It makes me think of how cool it might be for you to collect old photos from your town and make a multimedia project out of it.
Here are some themes:
You know people would contribute, and I bet a project like this would get a lot of traffic.
Maybe your state archive, library or historical society would like to help in some way, too.
Cool Web Stuff
Zoho, an online office-applications company, just introduced a bunch of new stuff, including a neat charting feature for its spreadsheet program. The program allows you to import data and chart it in 21 different ways. And when you're finished, you can embed the charts you make in a Web site.
The New York Times points to another cool Web service called GrandCentral:
It's a rather brilliant melding of cellphone and the Internet.
Its motto, "One number for life," pretty much says it all. At GrandCentral.com, you choose a new, single, unified phone number (more on this in a moment). You hand it out to everyone you know, instructing them to delete all your old numbers from their Rolodexes.
From now on, whenever somebody dials your new uninumber, all of your phones ring simultaneously.
No longer will anyone have to track you down by dialing each of your numbers in turn. No longer does it matter if you're home, at work or on the road. Your new GrandCentral phone number will find you.
As a bonus, all messages now land in a single voice mail box.
More from Internet Telephony magazine and CNet.
New Words for Oxford Dictionary
The March additions include:
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends upon the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected.
