Balancing career goals and parenthood desires: results from a survey of undergraduate pre-health students at a hispanic-serving institution in Texas.

OBJECTIVE: To examine family planning and fertility experiences and views, as well as desired parenthood timing and career plans, of diverse undergraduate pre-health students. PARTICIPANTS: 266 pre-health undergraduate students attending a Hispanic-Serving Institution in South Texas. METHODS: We conducted a cross-sectional, online survey with a purposive sample of undergraduate students and analyzed data descriptively. RESULTS: Most students desired children in the future but were concerned about planning the timing of parenthood against their career training. The results highlight the need to improve both family planning and fertility knowledge, based on a high unmet need for contraceptives, low perceived knowledge about fertility/infertility treatment, and a desire to learn more about planning the timing of their career training alongside parenthood. CONCLUSIONS: This study highlights potential gaps in reproductive health information and services among diverse, health-focused students needed to inform choices about the timing of their families and career training.

Hospitalist Perceptions of Fall Prevention: A Comparison of Two Health Care Systems.

Inpatient falls are common, but little is known about hospitalist perceptions regarding their exact role in fall prevention. The authors conducted a cross-sectional analysis of hospitalists' attitudes and perceived barriers to fall prevention practices in 2 different hospital systems in Portland, Oregon. A total of 42 responses were collected. Although hospitalists in both groups agreed that all patients admitted should undergo fall risk assessments (FRAs), both groups disagreed that hospitalists should be responsible for performing them. Neither group felt that they had the time to complete FRAs and were either neutral or felt the lack of expertise to conduct them. These findings suggest that the hospitalist role in inpatient fall prevention multidisciplinary teams may be unclear to physician providers and that health care systems may benefit from examining this further.

Women in medicine and the ticking clock.

Our careers began with the long, arduous, and intensely focused commitments of premed, medical school, residency, and fellowship. We planned our lives rationally and enacted our plans with care. Now we have long-desired and satisfying careers. We discovered something, however, that the culture of medical training and our plans had failed to anticipate: We did not allow time for the unexpected.

Effects of a geriatrician-led hip fracture program: improvements in clinical and economic outcomes.

The hip fracture service (HFS) is an interdisciplinary, geriatrician-led program instituted to improve the care of frail elderly people who present to the hospital with acute hip fracture. The HFS pilot project used existing hospital personnel and facilities and initiated new practices, including set protocols, preprinted orders, and standardized assessments, to achieve and evaluate patient triage and care and hospital cost savings. Outcome measures for 91 patients with acute hip fracture consecutively admitted to the HFS were compared with those of 72 historical controls managed under standard care in the prior year. Analysis demonstrated better outcomes in terms of length of stay (6.1+/-2.4 days for standard care, 4.6+/-1.1 days for the HFS; P<.001) and time to surgery (<24 hours after admission in 22.2% of standard care patients vs 50.5% of HFS patients; P<.001). Furthermore, the HFS model showed a reduction in total costs, resulting in a gain in net income, from a deficit of $908+/-4,977 (95% confidence interval (CI)=-$2,078-261) per patient in the standard group to a gain of $1,047+/-2,718 (95% CI=$481-1,613) per patient in the HFS group (P<.002). The findings suggest that care with set protocols overseen by a trained lead physician may improve the quality and cost effectiveness of managing elderly patients with hip fracture. Although the results must be interpreted with caution because of the pre-post design, this pilot study provides a model of care for further hypothesis generation and more rigorous testing into the quality and financial benefits of a geriatrics-led care process.