LEBANON, NH — Medical mistakes lead to as many as 440,000 deaths each year, making it the third-leading cause of death in the United States. As part of its ongoing commitment to patient safety, Dartmouth-Hitchcock will present an in-depth documentary about medical errors and the work being undertaken to create a new age of patient safety.

Through interviews with leaders in health care, footage of real-world efforts leading to safer care, and one family’s compelling journey from victim to empowerment, “To Err is Human” provides a unique look at our health care system’s ongoing fight against preventable harm.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock will present two showings of the film, on Monday, October 29 in Lebanon and on Tuesday October 30 in Manchester. The film will be followed by panel discussions including the film’s producer and health care providers and professionals from Dartmouth-Hitchcock They will discuss patient safety issues raised in the film and the work being done at Dartmouth-Hitchcock to reduce medical errors and increase patient safety.

The October 29 presentation will be held at 5 p.m. in Auditoria E-F of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon; panelists in the post-film discussion will include D-H CEO and President Joanne Conroy, MD; “To Err is Human” producer Mike Eisenberg; D-H Chief Quality and Value Officer George T. Blike, MD; Jean Avery, RN, director of the Patient Safety Training Center (PTSC) at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center; D-H Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel John Kacavas; and Tanya Lord, Director of Patient and Family Engagement for the Foundation for Healthy Communities and the mother of a patient who experienced a medical error at a hospital in another state.

The October 30 presentation will be held at 5 p.m. in Mara Auditorium at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester. Blike, Eisenberg, and Lord will be joined on a panel there by Peter Thurber, operations manager of the PTSC, and Jonathan Thyng, MD, Associate Medical Director for Primary Care at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Nashua.

The film and the panel discussions are free and open to the public. To learn more about the documentary, visit the “To Err is Human” web site at: https://www.toerrishumanfilm.com/

Newport NH– The Sullivan County Board of Commissioners announced that Sturm, Ruger & Company has won the inaugural Sullivan County Commissioners Community Partner Award for 2018.  According to Chairman Jeff Barrette, “This award recognizes the outstanding and generous contributions Sturm Ruger has made to Sullivan County for many years.  As we revamped our employee recognition program this past year we thought it was appropriate to also include our community partners and say thank you to them as well.”

Ruger’s contributions include supplying the Sheriff’s Department and Department of Corrections with duty weapons and they have conducted armorer’s training free of charge for County personnel.  Additionally, they supported the 2018 New Hampshire Association of Counties Annual Conference, which was hosted by Sullivan County, by donating two weapons for a fundraising raffle and helping the town of Newport put on a shooting demonstration for conference guests.

Barrette continued, “Sturm, Ruger & Company is a pillar in our county and has been for many generations.  I don’t know that we’ve taken time to appropriately thank them over the years for what they mean to our community.  This award is Sullivan County’s way of saying thanks for what they do for our employees and our taxpayers.”

The Community Partner Award will be formally presented at the Sullivan County Service Awards dinner on Friday, October 26^th, at the Common Man Restaurant in Claremont.

Concord, NH – The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has announced a five-year, $1.85 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that will help the Granite State improve and sustain oral health. The funding will go toward promoting oral health in three targeted areas: assisting school children who face barriers to dental treatment; ensuring fluoride optimization in community water systems; and improving surveillance and reporting of the State’s oral health system.

“This grant allows us to celebrate October, National Dental Hygiene Awareness Month, in a very meaningful way,” said Hope Saltmarsh, DHHS Oral Health Program Director. “We are putting these funds to work to target New Hampshire initiatives of decreasing tooth decay and closing gaps in demographic and geographic differences in oral health.”

Tooth decay is the most common chronic childhood disease. The first area addressed with the funds is the NH Oral Health Program’s school-based dental programs to promote good oral health care among New Hampshire’s youth. Through school-based dental programs from 2001 to 2014, the percentage of third graders in NH with sealants increased 15% and those with untreated dental decay decreased 14%. Even with these improvements, children in some areas of the state continue to experience higher rates of untreated decay than their peers. The new CDC grant will facilitate a follow up survey of third graders’ oral health and provide services to more students in elementary and middle school-based programs that have a higher percentage of untreated decay.

Secondly, the Oral Health Program will work in coordination with fluoridated community water systems to ensure fluoride optimization. This will be done through monitoring of water quality, promoting training, and incentivizing optimization. Community assessments will be conducted to allow the Oral Health Program to better understand community perceptions about fluoridation, and to better communicate the health benefits that have been experienced in key communities throughout the state, including Concord, Durham, Laconia, Lancaster and Manchester.

The final grant outcome will be improvements to the State’s monitoring and reporting systems. Oral diseases, risk factors and access to preventive services information will be used in conjunction with data gathered from the New Hampshire Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a joint CDC–DHHS project. According to the data, a third of women enrolled in Medicaid reported needing to see a dentist for a problem during pregnancy, but only about half actually visited a dentist due to their inability to afford care. Poor oral health is associated with increased risk for diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and adverse pregnancy outcomes. The funding will ensure robust reporting and observation of data gathered from the NH Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System.

LEBANON, NH – Trauma patients – with injuries ranging from those suffered in auto accidents to battlefield wounds – often seem, initially, to be stable, only to deteriorate without warning.  If not recognized early, this deterioration in condition can lead to shock or even death.

Doctors and researchers in the Emergency Department at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC), as well as colleagues at Dartmouth College, the Thayer School of Engineering, and the Geisel School of Medicine, hope to improve care for seriously injured patients with a new $3 million Precision Trauma Care Research Award  from the Department of Defense’s Combat Casualty Care Research Program.

The three-year grant will develop an easy-to-use, noninvasive system for the detection of ongoing internal hemorrhaging in soldiers or other seriously injured patients initially classified as injured but stable. The Dartmouth-Hitchcock/Dartmouth College group will collaborate with the Mayo Clinic, the Ohio State University, and Maryland Shock Trauma.

“Emergency providers don’t currently have a good way to predict which patients will remain stable, and which will go into shock,” explains Norman A. Paradis, MD, an emergency physician at D-H and a professor of emergency medicine at Geisel, who serves as the project’s principal investigator.

“Our objective is to develop a non-invasive system that gives an accurate and early alarm that a patient has begun to deteriorate,” Paradis says.  “Individual patients will benefit from early intervention and medical systems will benefit because they can focus their attention and resources on patients who have been correctly identified as needing immediate care, while our system continuously monitors their other patients.”

Paradis says the grant was inspired by an email from Baghdad written in June 2007. Battlefield military physicians wrote:  “[T]here are three groups of casualties: 1) the ones who are really sick and (almost) everyone knows it; 2) the ones who have minimal injuries and will live almost regardless of what we do; and 3) those who look like they aren’t too bad but then deteriorate. (We are) most interested in identifying group three.”

The development team will include trauma specialists, engineers, computer programmers, and other experts to create a monitoring system that will gather signals continuously from multiple sites on the patient, using state-of-the-art sensors and computational technologies.

“The combination of machine learning and state-of-the-art sensing technology will allow us to better understand the early responses to hemorrhage,” Paradis says.  “We anticipate not only creating an innovative medical technology, but to also producing important new science.”

The U.S. Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity is the awarding and administering acquisition office. This work is supported by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs endorsed through the Department of Defense, through the Defense Medical Research and Development Program, Joint Program Committee 6, Combat Casualty Care Research Program – Precision Trauma Care Research Award under Award No. W81XWH-18-2-0076.

Hanover NH- Dartmouth College is hiring an external investigator to look into hazing allegations of 12 student organizations and the Dimensions performance group. The Dartmouth reports that Senior Associate Dean of
Student Affairs – Liz Agosto ’01, made the announcement on Thursday evening.
The decision came after Dartmouth received an increased number of reports of hazing incidents this term. Some incidents included thosethat could threaten the health and safety of students.

According to Agosto, the organizations will be informed this week whether they are
under investigation. The Hanover Police Department is also looking
into possible cases of criminal activity.
The College will internally investigate reports of incidents like
students wearing “unicorn costumes”— not by the external investigator.
The investigation will consist of interviews with Greek house
presidents and, in the case of suspected hazing, new members and new
member educators.-