Johns Hopkins Hospital Quotes

I hereby give consent to the staff of The Johns Hopkins Hospital to perform any operative procedures and under any anaesthetic either local or general that they may deem necessary in the proper surgical care and treatment of:

My daughter lived more than six years with an incurable disease that filled her head with devils that literally hounded her to death, and she did it while laughing, painting, writing poetry, advocating and bringing joy to the people around her. She was the bravest person I have ever known, and her suicide doesn't change that. "Natalie will help our society to move forward," a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins Hospital wrote me upon learning of the suicide. "She is helping us to look at mental illness with the respect, the compassion and the dignity it deserves." I hope so. Natalie would have loved that legacy.

In 2013 a study published in the Journal of Patient Safety8 put the number of premature deaths associated with preventable harm at more than 400,000 per year. (Categories of avoidable harm include misdiagnosis, dispensing the wrong drugs, injuring the patient during surgery, operating on the wrong part of the body, improper transfusions, falls, burns, pressure ulcers, and postoperative complications.) Testifying to a Senate hearing in the summer of 2014, Peter J. Pronovost, MD, professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and one of the most respected clinicians in the world, pointed out that this is the equivalent of two jumbo jets falling out of the sky every twenty-four hours. “What these numbers say is that every day, a 747, two of them are crashing. Every two months, 9/11 is occurring,” he said. “We would not tolerate that degree of preventable harm in any other forum.”9 These figures place preventable medical error in hospitals as the third biggest killer in the United States—behind only heart disease and cancer.

By collecting data from the vast network of doctors across the globe, they added dozens of new compounds to the arsenal—all proven effective against COVID-19. Dr. Kory told me that he was deeply troubled that the extremely successful efforts by scores of front-line doctors to develop repurposed medicines to treat COVID received no support from any government in the entire world—only hostility—much of it orchestrated by Dr. Fauci and the US health agencies. The large universities that rely on hundreds of millions in annual funding from NIH were also antagonistic. “We didn’t have a single academic institution come up with a single protocol,” said Dr. McCullough. “They didn’t even try. Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Duke, you name it. Not a single medical center set up even a tent to try to treat patients and prevent hospitalization and death. There wasn’t an ounce of original research coming out of America available to fight COVID—other than vaccines.” All of these universities are deeply dependent on billions of dollars that they receive from NIH. As we shall see, these institutions live in terror of offending Anthony Fauci, and that fear paralyzed them in the midst of the pandemic. “Dr. Fauci refused to promote any of these interventions,” says Kory. “It’s not just that he made no effort to find effective off-the-shelf cures—he aggressively suppressed them.” Instead of supporting McCullough’s work, NIH and the other federal regulators began actively censoring information on this range of effective remedies. Doctors who attempted merely to open discussion about the potential benefits of early treatments for COVID found themselves heavily and inexplicably censored. Dr. Fauci worked with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other social media sites to muzzle discussion of any remedies. FDA sent a letter of warning that N-acetyle-L-cysteine (NAC) cannot be lawfully marketed as a dietary supplement, after decades of free access on health food shelves, and suppressed IV vitamin C, which the Chinese were using with extreme effectiveness.

I am on a train passing through Baltimore, where I grew up. I can see vacant lots, charred remains of burned buildings surrounded by rubbish, billboards advertising churches, and other billboards for DNA testing of children’s paternity. Johns Hopkins Hospital looms out of the squalor. The hospital is on an isolated island situated slightly east of downtown. The downtown area is separated from the hospital complex by a sea of run-down homes, a freeway, and a massive prison complex. Eastern Europe and the Soviet bloc come to mind. Failed industry and failed housing schemes and forced relocation disguised as urban renewal.

It is much more important to know what sort of patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.” —William Osler, physician and founding professor at Johns Hopkins Hospital

the city needed “a hospital of sufficient capacity for the segregation and care of persons, both white and colored, suffering from diseases such as scarlet fever, diphtheria, etc.”56 The chairman of the commission (Dr. John M. T. Finney) and the Johns Hopkins Hospital superintendent (Dr. Winford H. Smith) cooperated and agreed with the health commissioner’s plan.

In March 1942, the Office of the Surgeon General noted a growing incidence of jaundice (yellowing of the skin caused by liver disease) among US Army personnel stationed in California, England, Hawaii, Iceland, and Louisiana. All of those jaundiced had recently received a yellow fever vaccine, which, in addition to containing yellow fever vaccine virus, contained human serum as a stabilizing agent. On April 15, 1942, the surgeon general ordered that yellow fever vaccination be discontinued and that all existing lots be recalled and destroyed. Shortly thereafter, manufacturers made a yellow fever vaccine with water instead of serum, but it was too late. The serum used to stabilize the yellow fever vaccine had been obtained from nurses, medical students, and interns at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, several of whom had a history of jaundice and one of whom was actively infected at the time of the donation. By June 1942, fifty thousand US servicemen had been hospitalized with severe liver disease, and 150 had died from what would later be known as hepatitis B. Of the 141 lots of yellow fever vaccine provided to the army, seven were definitely contaminated. Among those who received one of those seven lots, 78 percent became infected. When the dust settled, 330,000 servicemen had been infected and one thousand had died. This was then and remains today one of the worst single-source outbreaks of a fatal infection ever recorded.

I’m Jay Powers, the circulating nurse”; “I’m Zhi Xiong, the anesthesiologist”—that sort of thing. It felt kind of hokey to me, and I wondered how much difference this step could really make. But it turned out to have been carefully devised. There have been psychology studies in various fields backing up what should have been self-evident—people who don’t know one another’s names don’t work together nearly as well as those who do. And Brian Sexton, the Johns Hopkins psychologist, had done studies showing the same in operating rooms. In one, he and his research team buttonholed surgical staff members outside their operating rooms and asked them two questions: how would they rate the level of communications during the operation they had just finished and what were the names of the other staff members on the team? The researchers learned that about half the time the staff did not know one another’s names. When they did, however, the communications ratings jumped significantly. The investigators at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere had also observed that when nurses were given a chance to say their names and mention concerns at the beginning of a case, they were more likely to note problems and offer solutions. The researchers called it an “activation phenomenon.” Giving people a chance to say something at the start seemed to activate their sense of participation and responsibility and their willingness to speak up. These were limited studies and hardly definitive. But the initial results were enticing. Nothing had ever been shown to improve the ability of surgeons to broadly reduce harm to patients aside from experience and specialized training. Yet here, in three separate cities, teams had tried out these unusual checklists, and each had found a positive effect. At Johns Hopkins, researchers specifically measured their checklist’s effect on teamwork. Eleven surgeons had agreed to try it in their cases—seven general surgeons, two plastic surgeons, and two neurosurgeons. After three months, the number of team members in their operations reporting that they “functioned as a well-coordinated team” leapt from 68 percent to 92 percent. At the Kaiser hospitals in Southern California, researchers had tested their checklist for six months in thirty-five hundred operations. During that time, they found that their staff’s average rating of the teamwork climate improved from “good” to “outstanding.” Employee satisfaction rose 19 percent. The rate of OR nurse turnover—the proportion leaving their jobs each year—dropped from 23 percent to 7 percent. And the checklist appeared to have caught numerous near errors. In

In the blink of an eye, Barbara had turned ninety-five. Taking her final breath in the Ottowan Nursing Home in Goodsprings, Nevada, she couldn’t believe her life would end like this. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. She had had so many plans growing up. Where did it all go wrong? Looking back, she realized it was all Roger’s fault. Roger, that bastard. Her mother had told her once that she could be anything she wanted, as long as she set her mind to it. Barbara had wanted to be a nurse. She enjoyed helping people, and even as a young girl, felt that she could make a difference in people’s lives. After finishing high school in 1915, she had enrolled at the Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing, only a short distance from where she had grown up, a little town called Fort Howard, Maryland. That had been before The Great War.

John, Heard about you while looking up Marketing Directors for major hospitals and love your backstory - incredible that you work as a volunteer firefighter as well. I specialize in iOS development for the healthcare industry. Recently, we built an app for Johns Hopkins that has increased their patient happiness rating by 75% through an automated dashboard. Interested in improving your patient happiness at Baylor? Let me know and I’ll send over some times to chat. Thanks, Alex

Halsted founded the surgical training program at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, in May 1889. As chief of the Department of Surgery, his influence was considerable, and his beliefs about how young doctors must apply themselves to medicine, formidable. The term “residency” came from Halsted’s belief that doctors must live in the hospital for much of their training, allowing them to be truly committed in their learning of surgical skills and medical knowledge. Halsted’s mentality was difficult to argue with, since he himself practiced what he preached, being renowned for a seemingly superhuman ability to stay awake for apparently days on end without any fatigue. But Halsted had a dirty secret that only came to light years after his death, and helped explain both the maniacal structure of his residency program and his ability to forgo sleep. Halsted was a cocaine addict.

How do we reward this kind of work? Chad Boult, the geriatrician who was the lead investigator of the University of Minnesota study, can tell you. A few months after he published the results, demonstrating how much better people’s lives were with specialized geriatric care, the university closed the division of geriatrics. “The university said that it simply could not sustain the financial losses,” Boult said from Baltimore, where he had moved to join the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. On average, in Boult’s study, the geriatric services cost the hospital $1,350 more per person than the savings they produced, and Medicare, the insurer for the elderly, does not cover that cost. It’s a strange double standard. No one insists that a $25,000 pacemaker or a coronary-artery stent save money for insurers. It just has to maybe do people some good.

The U.S. is the most dangerous of wealthy, democratic countries in the world for children,” said Dr. Ashish Thakrar of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, the lead author of the study. If the United States had simply improved at the same rate as other advanced countries, 600,000 children’s lives would have been saved, Thakrar calculates. If America had the same mortality rates as the average in the rest of the rich world, 21,000 kids’ lives would

The Philippine schools were essentially satellites of mainland universities. The Philippine Medical School, for instance, copied its curriculum from Johns Hopkins. Promising Filipino nurses were brought to the mainland to study. The result was hospitals staffed not just by trained nurses but by mainland-trained nurses. This allowed freshly arrived mainlanders to fit easily into roles as teachers and supervisors, with little adjustment.