Becker's Hospital Review

92 CMO / CARE DELIVERY Minnesota hospital shooting comes year after nurses asked for more security By Mackenzie Bean N urses at Minneapolis-based M Health Fairview say they asked for height- ened security in its hospitals' parking areas in 2019, but administrators ignored the request, reported the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. On the night of Sept. 14, a physician was shot in his head during an attempted robbery on a parking ramp at the system's Fairview South- dale Hospital in Edina, Minn., police said. The 45-year-old physician survived the shooting and was discharged from the hospital the next morning. As of Sept. 30, two arrests had been made in connection with the shooting. Nurses raised parking-related safety con- cerns during union contract negotiations with the health system last year, detailing "unsafe and mind-boggling obstacles" traveling to and from their cars, according to the report. They also described waiting at least an hour for hospital shuttles or to have security escort them to their cars. "M Health Fairview was not interested in dis- cussions regarding parking ramp safety when we proposed this in 2019 and never provid- ed any counterproposal," Cassy Fogale, a la- bor representative with the Minnesota Nurs- es Association, told the Journal Sentinel. M Health Fairview confirmed to the Journal Sentinel that it did not address parking safety during contract negotiations. "Workplace [safety] has been a shared con- cern for all of our hospital staff administra- tors," Joe Campbell, a spokesperson for the system, told the publication. "We all share the same common objective of making our hos- pitals safe places to work and receive care." Fairview Southdale Hospital is in the pro- cess of increasing hospital safety and secu- rity, Vice President of System Operations Paul Onufer told staff in a Sept. 15 email obtained by the Journal Sentinel. The hospital said it is boosting security patrols in parking struc- tures, adding more security officers outside its buildings and updating security technolo- gy, among other measures. n COVID-19 can invade brain cells, Yale research suggests By Mackenzie Bean T he virus that causes COVID-19 can enter brain cells, which may explain the neurological symptoms some patients experience, according to research cited by The New York Times. A team of researchers at New Haven, Conn.-based Yale University ex- amined COVID-19 brain infection by looking at mouse models, clusters of brain cells in petri dishes and brain tissue samples from a deceased COVID-19 patient. They found that SARS-CoV-2 can not only enter the brain, but take over brain cells to make copies of itself. The virus also appears to deprive nearby cells of oxygen, causing them to die. It's unclear how the virus travels to the brain or who is most likely to de- velop a brain infection. Some people may be more susceptible due to their genetic makeup or the viral load they're exposed to, researchers suggested. Researchers will need to analyze numerous autopsy brain samples to bet- ter understand how common brain infection is and who is infected. Based on their current research, they said infection of the brain is likely rare. The study was posted on the preprint server bioRxiv Sept. 9. n More than 8% of COVID-19 patients need to be hospitalized after initial ER discharge By Anuja Vaidya I n the Philadelphia region, nearly 1 in 10 COVID-19 patients returned to the hos- pital within a week of being discharged aer an emergency department visit, a study published Aug. 27 found. e study, published in the journal Academic Emergency Medicine, examined data for 1,419 patients who went to an ED between March 1 and May 28 in the Philadel- phia area. e patients were discharged, and they tested positive for COVID-19 in the seven days before or aer the ED visit. Researchers found 8.6 percent of patients came back to the hospital aer their first ED visit, with 4.7 percent being admitted to the hospital within three days of their initial ED visit, and 3.9 percent being hospitalized within one week. "We were surprised with the overall rate that patients return and need admission, which is twice that of other illnesses," said Austin Kilaru, MD, study lead author and an emergency medicine physician at Philadelphia-based Penn Medicine. "e con- cern is not that emergency physicians are making wrong decisions, but rather that COVID can be unpredictable and turn severe rather quickly." Researchers found that patients with low pulse oximetry readings were about four times as likely to need hospitalization aer returning to the hospital, compared to those with higher readings, and patients with fevers were more than three times as likely to be hospitalized versus those without fevers. n

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