Grant award program partnerships with your professional liability insurance carrier: an innovative approach to loss prevention and improved patient safety.

The financial success of a malpractice insurance program is directly influenced by how effectively the covered providers respond to risk. This article describes a University Self-Insurance Program partnership to provide small grants to providers who have the expertise and passion for a specific risk reduction activity that is cost effective and measurable and has a high probability of improving patient care and reducing claims or lawsuits. Implementation of this small grant concept can be tailored to become operational in virtually any setting from an independent medical practice to a multistate healthcare system.

Elevated brain weight/liver weight ratio in normal body weight centile term perinatal deaths: an indicator of terminal intrauterine malnourishment.

A proportion of antepartum/intrapartum intrauterine deaths (IUDs) with normal or elevated body weight (BW) centile also show an elevated brain weight/liver weight (BLR) ratio. We postulate that this may be an indication of intrauterine malnourishment/incipient intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR), which may have a bearing on the cause of death. Searching our departmental postmortem database, we identified 331 IUD/intrapartum deaths (254; 77%) or early neonatal deaths (77; 23%), ≥37/40 weeks gestation in a 4-year period.

Implementation and experience of an alternative QF-PCR and MLPA diagnostic strategy to detect chromosomal abnormalities in fetal and neonatal pathology samples.

Chromosomal abnormalities are a significant cause of pregnancy loss. Solid tissue fetal and neonatal pathology samples are routinely examined by karyotype analysis after cell culture. However, there is a high failure rate, and this approach is expensive and labor intensive.

Diversity of neuromuscular pathology in lethal multiple pterygium syndrome.

Lethal multiple pterygium syndrome (LMPS) is an uncommon fetal-onset disorder of unknown etiology. The pathogenesis of LMPS has been suggested to be early-onset fetal akinesia, fragile collagen, or generalized edema. Information on the neuromuscular pathology of LMPS in the literature is generally scanty.