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June 13th, 2008
Crusader Clinic will hold its first-ever winetasting fundraiser — which also is its first-ever summer fundraising event — from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. on July 12, said Vice President Development Linda Niemiec. The event will be at the University Club of Rockford, 945 N. Main St. It will include wine, hors d’oeuvres and music by local artist Dan Voll.
It also will include an auction with wine baskets, special bottles of wine and an original painting by local artist and former Rockford Park District Board Commissioner Charlotte Hackin.
 ”We thought this would be a nice way to reconnect with people in the summer,” Niemiec said. Funds raised will go for special needs at Crusader, she said.
Cost to attend is $30 per person or $50 per couple. The reservation deadline is July 9. For more information, call the Crusaders Health Foundation at 815-490-1620.
June 12th, 2008
Don’t be alarmed Friday, June 13Â if you overhear radio calls or chatter about a serious epidemic that just hit Rockford.
The epidemic is not real, but the calls will be. And they will be part of a very serious effort. The Winnebago County Health Department and dozens of local agencies will be doing a full-scale exercise to simulate what would happen if a real epidemic hit the Rock River Valley. They plan to test their preparedness on many levels for an honest-to-goodness health emergency.
I’ll be one of the media members at the scenario. Not even those in charge will know the identity of the infectious agent until Friday; that’s part of the exercise design. If a true health emergency hit, it probably wouldn’t come knocking politely. Local officials might not get any advance warning then, either.
In fact the scenario is so reality-oriented that media people covering the event must be credentialed and escorted by officials upon arriving. That’s part of the exercise also; the health department and local law enforcement agencies are testing the way they would coordinate with media members in a true emergency.
It should be interesting. We’ll keep you posted on HealthyRockford.com.
June 11th, 2008
As part of Rockford Health System’s annual Employee Appreciation Week, it told workers to leave their jobs Tuesday.
Leave them long enough, that is, for a picnic lunch or dinner. First- and second-shift employees had picnics during their respective shifts, while third-shift workers had a celebratory meal in the hospital cafeteria during the wee hours, said spokesman Mike Wiltse. The picnic is a 20-year tradition, he said, to thank employees for their work and dedication.
Throughout this week, employees receive a small appreciative token every day. Wednesday everyone got a packet of wildflower seeds, Wiltse said. Friday night will be an anniversary dinner for employees and ex-employees who have been there at least 20 years.
Rockford Health System is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year.
June 9th, 2008
Poplar Grove resident Paula Irwin, 56, found out at a May 8 lumpectomy that she had early-stage malignant tumors in both her breasts.Â
Twelve days later she was finished with radiation treatment, thanks to the MammoSite Radiation Therapy System.
Rather than a typical six-week regimen of external beam radiation used after a lumpectomy, MammoSite uses a five-day radiation treatment that is delivered from the inside of the cavity from which the tumor was removed. The radiation comes from a computer-controlled High Dose Rate (HDR) machine, and goes through a catheter attached to a small balloon inside that cavity in the breast. Because it is targeted and works from the inside, a higher daily dose of radiation can be used for a shorter period of time. The MammoSite system got FDA clearance in 2002.
OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center has had the MammoSite system since May 2005, and SwedishAmerican Health System since April 2007.  Irwin received her MammoSite treatments at SwedishAmerican. Her last treatment was about three weeks ago.
“Within a matter of 12 days I was done with surgery and radiation all at once,” Irwin said. “It was time-efficient, which was really good for me. Plus, the external radiation tends to burn you; I’m very fair-skinned and burn easily.”
Temporary balloons with catheters are inserted at the time of the lumpectomy, after the surgeon has determined that that cancer has not spread and there is enough tissue around the cavity, said SwedishAmerican Manager of Radiation Oncology Kathy Stukenberg. When the MammoSite treatment is ready to start, the temporary balloons and catheters are removed and the MammoSite ones installed, she said.
“It was a little painful having them taken out and put back in, but nothing unbearable,” Irwin said.
The MammoSite treatments usually are done in seven-to-10-minute increments twice a day for five days, Stukenberg said. Generally each day’s treatments are spaced 5 to 6 hours apart, she said.
The procedure can only be used on people with early-stage cancer which has not spread beyond the margins of the lump, Stukenberg said. And it’s normally used for women age 45 and older, because breast cancer in younger women tends to be a more aggressive type. “If any lumph nodes are positive, you can’t have it done. And if you’re small breasted you can’t have it done because there is not enough surface tissue.”
To find out more about the MammoSite Radiation Therapy System, you can go to http://www.mammosite.com.
June 6th, 2008
This weekend, 60 high school students from northern Illinois are getting a taste of what it’s like to work in healthcare professions — complete with an emergency simulation of a car crash and its victims, a tour through a human cadaver, and a public health pandemic game.
The students are attending the fourth annual Rural Health Careers Camp on the Northern Illinois University campus. They’ve been recruited by guidance counselors and science teachers from small towns across northern Illinois. The camp’s purpose is to give the students a glimpse into healthcare careers that might bring them back home to work after graduating.
Healthcare professions find it tough to recruit students from rural communities because there aren’t many role models or places to work, said Alan Robinson, director of outreach for the NIU College of Health and Human Sciences.
The students range from incoming freshmen to juniors. The camp program tries to catch students early in high school so they have time to go back to school and sign up for the right courses if they’re interested in a healthcare career, Robinson said. Those courses might include second-year biology or chemistry, he said, if the students want to qualify for healthcare related majors once they reach college.
Sponsors include the University of Illinois National Center for Rural Health Professions, the NIU colleges of Health and Human Sciences and Educaiton, the Northern Illinois Area Health Education Center, and NIU Student Affairs.
June 5th, 2008
On June 13, the Winnebago County Health Department will be testing its Emergency Operations Plan with an exercise involving about 30 local agencies. The department has done about four such exercises in the past two years, said Emergency Response Coordinator Dan Reilly.
The Emergency Operations Plan was created to provide a coordinated response of county government and community in the event of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack, Reilly said.
Each of the exercises is done according to an “incident action plan” to simulate a specific response to a specific problem, he said. “For example, if we had a smallpox breakout, that would require a mass vaccination. But if we had an anthrax attack, that would require a specific medication distribution.
“The Centers for Disease Control says that in the event of certain types of infectious disease, we’d need to vaccinate everyone in the county within 48 hours.”
The June 13 exercise will test a scenario involving an infectious agent, Reilly said. The specific agent will not be revealed until the start of the exercise. The simulation will provide advanced vaccination training — a technique that is a bit different from normal vaccinations — at a mass vaccination site. “We’ll be sending all the Health Department people through it so they know what it looks like, as well as people from area agencies,” he said. Those agencies include all local hospitals, law enforcement agencies and fire departments, major employers and the Rock River Valley Blood Center as well as other entities, Reilly said.
The Health Department also wants to include nursing students, pharmacists and veterinarians in this exercise, Reilly said, “people you wouldn’t normally think of. We’d like to have a pool of semi-trained people so that if something would happen, we could get them trained really quickly and send them out.”
The department expects about 300 people to participate in the exercise.
For more information on participating, call Dan Reilly at 815-720-4217 or e-mail dreilly@wchd.org. The deadline for signing up to participate in the exercise is 5 p.m. on Wednesday, June 11.
June 4th, 2008
When I was a young girl, bananas were considered a deadly food.
It made sense in that time and place. We were living in Japan, it was the early 1960s, and a new cholera epidemic had just started in Indonesia and spread to Taiwan. The nation of Taiwan was the source from which Japan imported most of its bananas.
People in that part of the world were terrified of cholera. It could be a death sentence. The bactera that caused the disease came from the feces of infected people, and spread through contaminated water and (to a lesser extent) food — hence the fear of bananas from Taiwan. We knew that cholera, which causes severe diarrhea and vomiting, could send a healthy person into shock and death from dehydration in just a day or two. (These days the World Health Organization has a rehydration solution which is used to very effectively to treat cholera victims during outbreaks that still occur in third-world countries.)
I’d always thought of cholera as a third-world disease. But recently I learned that in the 1800’s, before people knew about bacterial infections and how they spread, several cholera pandemics made their way to the United States.
In fact, the first Board of Health in Rockford was created in 1854 because of a cholera pandemic that reached this city. Victims of the disease were quarantined in a house outside the city limits. Because the situation was considered a health emergency, the city passed an ordinance providing for nuisance abatement and preservation of health in June of that year, forming the new Board of Healtlh.
That Board of Health was a predecessor to today’s Winnebago County Health Department. The Board’s creation is the beginning spot in a historic timeline displayed on a wall at the WCHD building. According to its records, the Winnebago County Health Department opened in 1962 and merged with the city’s health department in 1970.
These days, cholera is not a threat in our part of the world. But the Winnebago County Health Department still is concerned and preparing for the possiblity of other potential pandemics, said Emergency Response Coordinator Dan Reilly.
In fact it has created an Emergency Operations Plan to provide coordinated responses of county government and community in case of a health emergency such as a pandemic or bioterrorism attack, Reilly said.
Under the plan, the Winnebago County Health Department holds exercises to train and test local agencies and health professionals on responses to specific health emergency scenarios, he said. One of those exercises is coming up on June 13.
Stay tuned to this blog for more details.
June 2nd, 2008
Want to see what patients have said about their satisfaction with a particular hospital, or how the hospital compares with others when it comes to recommended care and outcomes?
On the Web site “Hospital Compare” you can see that information for most hospitals across the country and here in the Rock River Valley.
The Web site was created by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, together with the Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA), a public-private collaboration that promotes reporting on hospital quality of care. The patient satisfaction and outcome data on Hospital Compare includes all patients, not just those on Medicare and Medicaid.Â
To find data on hospitals, click on the main Hospital Care link, then on the “Find and Compare Hospitals” bar, and then on the “Begin Search” bar under the “General Search” heading.Â
On the next page you can search by hospital name, zip code, city, state or county. That’s where I chose to view hospitals within 25 miles of Rockford. Five are listed: Rockford Memorial Hospital, SwedishAmerican Hospital, OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center, Beloit Memorial Hospital and Rochelle Community Hospital. All five provided process of care and outcome measures. For Rockford Memorial and Beloit Memorial, patient satisfaction ratings were not available.Â
The data on the above links is for the most recent survey, from July 2006 through June 2007. For archived information from earlier dates, click here.
I was alerted to this site by the quarterly Information Service Letter, a publication of the University of Illinois College of Medicine, Rockford.Â
May 30th, 2008
You may have researched your family tree — but what about your family health tree?
Beloit Memorial Hospital media coordinator Sarah Starmer recently alerted me to a new computer program from the U.S. Surgeon General that helps you create such a tree. The program is called “My Family Health Portrait,” and it helps you track factors such as heart disease, stroke, breast cancer and colon cancer in your own family history.
Family health history is one of the most important risk factors for chronic illnesses in your own life, said Larry Bergen, director of cardiovascular services at Beloit Memorial. The risk is in your genes as well as your family’s shared lifestyle and habits.
You can’t change the genes, but you can change risky health behaviors like smoking and poor eating habits, Bergen said.  And if you have a family history of certain chronic diseases, you could benefit greatly from screening tests for those diseases.
The free program “My Family Health Portrait” can be maintained online at https://familyhistory.hhs.gov/Â or you can download it onto your home computer at http://www.hhs.gov/familyhistory/download.html.
Beloit Memorial Hospital also has a Family Health Tree brochure you can request to receive in the mail. If you’re interested, call the hosptial’s community relations department at 608-364-5206.
May 29th, 2008
Lorna Benson of Minnesota Public Radio recently wrote a story about a new analysis of medical news coverage. One of the most common problems found in journalists’ reports on medical treatments, she noted: failure to “adequately discuss the price a consumer might have to pay for a new drug, device or test.” What’s more, Benson wrote, “about 65 percent of the medical stories didn’t mention whether there was any possibility of harm associated with a particular treatment.”
Benson’s article summarized the findings of University of Minnesota journalism professor Gary Schwitzer and his reviewers, who have been rating the quality of health intervention stories by U.S. newspapers, news magazines, television networks and wire services. Their findings were published in the Public Library of Science journal, “PLoS Medicine.” You can link to that report here.Â
Schwitzer said the report summarized his team’s first two years of grading health stories on their own Web site, HealthNewsReview.org.  I’ll be visiting and learning.
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