Editor's Note This study by researchers from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, finds substantial adverse maternal outcomes among pregnant patients with COVID-19 at delivery, during the early pandemic period. A total of 2,578,095 patients were analyzed. During the 9-month study period (April to December 2020), 45,425 pregnant patients…

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Editor's Note The Food and Drug Administration, on April 7, identified the recall by Philips Respironics of certain reworked DreamStation continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) and bileveled positive airway pressure (BiPAP) machines as Class I, the most serious. These machines also were recalled in June 2021. The recall was initiated…

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Editor's Note Researchers led by Florida A&M University and Florida State University in Tallahassee propose multi-learner virtual reality (VR) environments assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) as effective alternatives to facility-based training for nontechnical skills. As failure to communicate is cited as the reason for 22% of preventable complications in the…

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Editor's Note Researchers at UHealth—the University of Miami Health System and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine—show that, in two cases, COVID-19 breached the placenta and caused brain injury in the newborn. Both infants tested negative for the virus at birth, but had significantly elevated COVID-19 antibodies in…

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Editor's Note The Joint Commission, on April 5, announced that it had updated its Health Care Equity Accreditation Standards & Resource Center to assist organizations in meeting their healthcare equity standards. The new resources include: Six new Snapshots (brief synopses of approaches used by other organizations) from Cook County Health…

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Editor's Note This study from the University of Texas Southwestern, Dallas, finds that nonoperative management of acute appendicitis was associated with reduced complications in older but not younger patients. Included in the analysis was data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s National Inpatient Sample on 474,845 patients with…

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Editor's Note The Joint Commission, on April 5, posted a clarification on the time frame for querying the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB). Among the revisions: Medical Staff (MS) Standard MS.06.01.07, Element of Performance (EP) 9 and Standard MS.07.01.01, EP 3, on the time frame to evaluate a licensed practitioner’s…

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Editor's Note This study from Stanford University finds that anesthesia residents who worked night float call rotations slept the same number of hours, but had less REM sleep, were more fatigued, and had less positive affect. All of these resolved a week after their rotation except fatigue. A total of…

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Editor's Note In this study, researchers from Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, find that violence-related trauma increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trauma registry data on 2,563 violence-related patient presentations in Connecticut from 2018 to 2021 were included in the analysis. The researchers found a: 55% increase in violence-related…

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Editor's Note On April 3, Penn Highlands Healthcare, DuBois, announced its new “Return to Work” Nursing Residency program for nurses who have taken an extended leave from their nursing careers, but want to return to work. Residency students participate in 5 weeks of courses that begin with didactics and progress…

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