Doctors And Nurses

The tyke in the Tigers cap drew his foot back, kicked as hard as he could and sent the soccer ball rolling toward the net. Jordan Champion, 3, of Suitland, decked out in a T-shirt that read "A Monster Ate My Socks," didn't seem to care all that much whether his shot eluded the goalie across from him, a 47-year-old physician named Fernando Mena. Neither did Mena, who just happened to let the ball roll through his legs. When the cluster of grown-ups around Jordan burst into applause, it was for his bigger triumph: Like the dozens of other kids and 200 or so parents on hand for a celebration at the Hippodrome on Saturday, he spent his first few weeks clinging to life in the neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU, of University of Maryland Medical Center.

WASHINGTON -- A new survey shows widespread discontent among doctors and nurses about the quality of health care under managed care plans. A majority of doctors said some of their patients had been denied coverage for a health service they needed, whether a prescription drug, a diagnostic test or a treatment.The survey was released in the midst of a struggle over patients' rights legislation on Capitol Hill, and was immediately criticized by spokesmen for health maintenance organizations and the insurance industry as flawed and exaggerated.

Polly Hesterberg begins each day in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit looking for adults in distress. With a mother's instinct for caring - and a nurse's attention to detail - she will check each room and bed for the tell-tale signs.A tearful mother has left her infant's bedside when some doctors approached. Did they unfairly push her out?The mom down the hall speaks only Turkish. Better call in a translator to make sure she understands what's happening to her son.The mother one door down was upset that her daughter was awakened so often during the night for tests.

Elizabeth W. Edsall loves to talk.The 17-year-old senior at the Severn School is a four-year member of the school's Oratorical Society, a two-year participant on the mock trial team and a first-place winner of the Rotary International District 7620 Speech Contest.But Edsall could deliver her most important speech when she tells of the obstacles she overcame as a cancer survivor at the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life at 6 p.m. tomorrow at Severna Park High School."Cancer used to be a death sentence, but it's not anymore," she said.

With buzzing command centers orchestrating everything from the pickup of hundreds of doctors and nurses to conserving bed linens, hospitals moved quickly over the weekend to cope with weather-related injuries and a host of logistical problems.Despite the cancellation of elective surgeries and outpatient appointments, patients were still making it to hospitals. Those who needed to come in -- for chemotherapy or radiation -- were transported by volunteers. One couple walked from the Towson Mall area to Greater Baltimore Medical Center for an in-vitro fertilization procedure that had to be done yesterday.

Linda Greenberg has a fairly long wish list this year.Boxes of cookies, doughnuts, cupcakes and brownies. Hundreds of bottles of soda. Warm, woolly blankets and sleeping bags. Baby dolls, toy cars and stuffed animals. Warm hot meals. A couple of doctors, nurses and beauticians would be great, too.A strange list, perhaps, but Greenberg is quick to point out that those are the things she needs this season to spread a little holiday cheer to about 5,000 homeless people in the Baltimore-Annapolis area.

Katherine Lawson is a passionate defender of human rights.In the eighth grade, the now 19-year-old Ellicott City woman helped the homeless by working in a Virginia soup kitchen. By the time she graduated from high school, she had participated in Washington marches in support of rights for women, gays and lesbians.Now, the 1993 Mount Hebron High School graduate is eager to lift the long-standing U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, a goal prompted by a 10-day trip to the communist nation last month.

John Harris and Tracey Housten live in a house divided.Wife Tracey, a registered nurse who has worked with trauma patients, loves "ER," the NBC television show about life in a Chicago hospital emergency room that has become the ratings hit of the new season. She hates to miss it.Husband John, an emergency room nurse at Northwest Hospital Center in Randallstown, hates "ER." With a passion."She really enjoys the show," says Mr. Harris, his face contorted into the I-can't-believe-anyone-watches-this-trash look of a man who truly doesn't understand.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Brad Holman will be going home today -- by land, not by air.Felled by a line drive to the face on Sunday in Texas, the Seattle Mariners rookie has a bruised sinus cavity -- not a broken one -- and could rejoin the team within two weeks.The only bad news yesterday, after a series of tests, was that for the next 10 to 14 days, Holman can't work out and can't fly. So today, when he is released from a hospital in Arlington, Texas, his wife will pick him up and drive them to their home in Wichita, Kan."

MY father-in-law recently died of colon cancer. He spent his final weeks in a hospital bed, which afforded me an unwanted but important perspective on how well the health-care system deals with terminally ill patients.First the good news -- a good deal of progress has been made in allowing terminally ill patients to control the use of medical technology. Doctors were generally very willing to abide by my father-in-law's wishes about aggressive medical care. He said he did not want any extraordinary forms of life support or heroic measures, and none was given.

Dr. Mojtaba Gashti, the Baltimore surgeon who brought a Haitian boy to the U.S. to remove an enormous tumor that might have otherwise killed him, has been named 2009 Public Citizen of the Year by the Maryland Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers. Gashti, chief of vascular surgery at Union Memorial Hospital, was honored by the group for his humanitarian missions to Haiti, an annual medical pilgrimage he has made to the impoverished country since 1994. In February, Gashti brought 13-year-old Osly St. Preux and his mother to Baltimore, put them up at his Ellicott City home and arranged for the boy's surgeries.

The tyke in the Tigers cap drew his foot back, kicked as hard as he could and sent the soccer ball rolling toward the net. Jordan Champion, 3, of Suitland, decked out in a T-shirt that read "A Monster Ate My Socks," didn't seem to care all that much whether his shot eluded the goalie across from him, a 47-year-old physician named Fernando Mena. Neither did Mena, who just happened to let the ball roll through his legs. When the cluster of grown-ups around Jordan burst into applause, it was for his bigger triumph: Like the dozens of other kids and 200 or so parents on hand for a celebration at the Hippodrome on Saturday, he spent his first few weeks clinging to life in the neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU, of University of Maryland Medical Center.

Kim Cass knows better than most how traumatic a trip to the emergency room can be for a child. For about 12 years, Cass, a pediatrician, has seen a lot of children more upset about their visit to the emergency room than their illness. "With the bright lights, equipment, and doctors and nurses everywhere, it can be really scary for a child," said Cass, the director of pediatric emergency medicine at Upper Chesapeake Medical Center in Bel Air. In an effort to help kids feel more at ease, Cass is holding the first Teddy Bear Clinic in the hospital's pediatric emergency room.

I walked into a dark auditorium with my laptop, a photo slide show ready and butterflies in my belly. I thought, "I'll do OK." After all, I had the laughing horse photo, my secret weapon. Kids love the laughing horse. I was asked by Rob Paymer, a former Sun photography intern who now is director of Bridges, a summer continuing-education program at St. Paul's School, to speak to a crowd of third-, fourth- and fifth-graders. After the slide show (the laughing horse is now famous at Bridges)

The federal judge hearing death-row inmate Vernon L. Evans Jr.'s challenge to Maryland's lethal-injection procedures said yesterday that he might direct state corrections officials to "test the recruitment waters" in search of doctors or highly trained nurses to participate in state executions before he rules on whether to require the medical professionals' involvement. U.S. District Judge Benson E. Legg said that nine days of trial testimony, stretched over three months, had left "a hole in the record" regarding the availability of doctors and nurses trained and willing to monitor an inmate's level of consciousness and to perform a surgical procedure to establish an IV in a major vein.

In North Carolina, a physician monitored a condemned inmate's brain waves as the drugs that would bring death were about to be added to the IV. The doctor was prepared to direct executioners to inject more anesthesia if the prisoner remained conscious. Doctors in Georgia have gradually taken on larger roles in state executions, starting intravenous lines when nurses could not and, on one occasion, even ordering a second dose of potassium chloride after a prisoner's heart did not stop. In Maryland, a team of correctional officers, prison officials and hired nursing assistants and paramedics carries out executions.

Blair and Ahern warn parties to elect N. Ireland government ARMAGH, Northern Ireland -- The British and Irish prime ministers, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, issued an ultimatum yesterday to Northern Ireland's divided politicians: Elect a power-sharing administration by November - or your legislature will be disbanded. Their declaration followed 3 1/2 years of diplomacy that has failed to revive a Catholic-Protestant administration, the intended centerpiece of the Good Friday peace accord that the two prime ministers oversaw eight years ago. A previous coalition collapsed in October 2002 over an Irish Republican Army spying scandal.

WASHINGTON -- U.S. patients receive proper medical care from doctors and nurses only 55 percent of the time, regardless of their race, income, education or insurance status, according to a national study published yesterday in The New England Journal of Medicine. A well-functioning health care system should provide recommended levels of care 80 percent to 90 percent of the time, the study's authors said. In a performance review of preventive services and care for 30 chronic conditions, including hypertension, diabetes and heart disease, researchers found that it's almost a coin flip as to whether patients get the recommended care from doctors and nurses - even though the standard treatments are widely known.

GRETNA, La. - Scores of Baltimore firefighters, police and other workers, as well as doctors and nurses from across Maryland, started relief operations yesterday in two hurricane-swept suburban areas along the Mississippi River, both a few minutes' drive south of New Orleans. But several volunteers said they were frustrated that they weren't given more challenging tasks. Specially trained and equipped urban search-and-rescue teams sent by the Baltimore Fire Department were asked by the city of Gretna to relieve local volunteer firefighters who were tired and understaffed after almost 11 days on the job. After watching heart-wrenching images on television of storm victims suffering and dying, physicians, nurses and other health care workers from Maryland had expected to treat the seriously ill and wounded.

BATON ROUGE, La. - Every five minutes the scene repeated: An ambulance or bus pulled up to the arena at Louisiana State University and a crowd of men and women in green scrubs and rubber gloves closed around it. Then another nursing home resident snatched from the dark, or another dehydrated child or another potential heart attack victim disappeared into a makeshift emergency room, which reached its theoretical capacity of 200 the instant it opened Sunday....