In a Tennessee operating room, Dr. Marty Sellers is performing a revolutionary organ recovery technique, normothermic regional perfusion. "It replenishes the oxygen deprivation that the organs incur during the dying process," says Sellers. "If we recover the organ and put it on ice in an oxygen-deprived state, it’s not as healthy when it gets into the recipient."

The American Journal of Bioethics dedicated a recent issue to the controversy over whether the technique blurs the definition of death.  "The bottom line is that NRP violates foundational ethical norms around the determination of death and should not be pursued," says Matthew DeCamp, MD, PhD, who helped write a policy statement opposing NRP for the American College of Physicians.  Read or listen to NPR story>>

Mark J. Kissler, MD, and five CU Anschutz colleagues are the authors of a paper that evaluates medical literature on the role of attention in the clinical environment. They identified 6 categories of literature related to attention: the clinical environment and its effect on attention, personal factors affecting attention, relationships between interventions or factors that affect attention and patient outcomes, the effect of clinical alarms and alarm fatigue on attention, and health information technology’s effect on attention. 

The authors propose that a well-functioning environment enables good care without overtaxing the clinician’s cognitive or emotional resources. But simply creating a “sterile cockpit” for a distraction-free environment is unrealistic in most health care settings. They conclude that to be effective, health care quality improvement efforts need to transition from siloed quality improvement interventions to multidisciplinary efforts that understand that health care is composed of complex and overlapping environments.  Read article>>