Web Stuff: Meds and Heat, Noise Epidemic, Nurses and Smartphones at Work

 

Flickr/National Archives and Records Administration

Medicines and summer heat. Anyone with one or more prescription medicines might occasionally wonder whether there’s a better place to store them than a kitchen cabinet. This is especially true for meds mailed to you in three-month supplies rather than the one-month supply we used to get.

Here’s a brief article at the NPR Shots blog that notes a few meds that you particularly should be concerned about, emphasizes that areas of extreme heat or humidity are the worst location (so-called “medicine cabinets” in humid and hot bathrooms are not so great, nor are cabinets over stoves, in direct sun, or the like). While most medicines can tolerate a certain amount of abuse, the ideal environment for most of them (except those that need refrigeration) is room temperature, which doesn’t mean Fahrenheit temperatures reaching into the 80s or 90s. I’ve sometimes wondered why someone doesn’t just invent a type of medicine storage container that can be locked if need be, limits humidity, etc. Steal my idea—please! Are there any strategies you find effective for safely storing medications?

Smartphones at work: OK, in case you didn’t know it, most nurses are using smartphones at work:

In 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that 72 percent of physicians use smartphones. Nurses […]

Poll: What Can We Actually Do About Hospital Room Noise?

By ArtsieApsie, via Flickr

Fierce Healthcare reports this week on the latest findings about hospital room noise: “hospital rooms can be as noisy as chainsaws, according to a new study [subscription required] published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine….The average noise level in patient rooms was close to 50 decibels….The noise disruptions mostly come from staff conversation, roommates, alarms, intercoms and pagers….Loud hospital rooms are associated with clinically significant sleep loss among patients and even may hinder recovery.”

So, nurses (and patients, MDs, others): can anything be done about this? Does your hospital do anything? Take our poll, and also of course feel free to leave a comment on this post.—JM, senior editor

[polldaddy poll=5850198]
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